“Oh, that’s too bad,” Andy said. “But you’ll survive,” he added, picking up on Gladys’s phrase.
As she shuffled around the kitchen, Jesus offered another round of coaching. “Talk to him about me healing people’s pain.”
Gladys nodded at Jesus, not very concerned whether Andy would see that gesture. Andy was easy company.
Pulling the big square Tupperware container, now only half full, over to the edge of the counter, Gladys said, “At my church we pray for people who have pain and such, but I don’t see ‘em getting better much of the time, not like when Jesus was healing people back in his day.”
“Jesus loves me, this I know,” Andy said.
As far as Gladys knew, Andy didn’t go to church. His mother had been drifting away from her faith since her husband left. Andy’s father had never been a faithful church-goer either. But the line from that old children’s song reminded Gladys that Andy did go to church when he was little.
“Yes, he does love you,” Gladys said, pausing to look at Jesus, who was sitting across from Andy at the kitchen table, smiling joyously at him. “I know he loves you.”
“He loves you too, then,” Andy said insistently. “You can sing the song too ya’ know.”
“Yes, I can sing it, and I used to when I was a girl. Seems like us older people forget important things like that—how Jesus loves us, not how to sing the song.”
Gladys pulled the fridge open and lugged the half gallon of milk over to the counter. A full milk jug was about the heaviest thing Gladys could lift with one hand these days. Jesus prompted her once more.
“Go ahead and let him know that you believe I can heal your hips.”
Her eyes narrowed as she turned to him for a moment and then back to pouring the milk. Did she believe he could do it?
“I don’t feel like I do believe it,” Gladys said without moving her lips, sending Jesus a response with a bit of apology laced around the edges.
“All you have to do is give me a chance, and I’ll show you,” Jesus said.
As Gladys laid the cookies on a medium sized plate, she made a stab at the conversation Jesus was encouraging. “Do you believe that Jesus wants to heal those people he loves, wants to make them feel better, Andy?”
Andy was watching the cookies, counting and wondering how many he would get to eat. He hoped Gladys wasn’t thinking about how his mom wouldn’t want him to have too many. He did just have lunch a little while ago.
“I don’t know, I guess so.” His answer wasn’t delivered like it was born out of any carefully consideration, of course. He was more interested in cookies.
Gladys carried the plate and the glass of milk to the table and set them in front of Andy. She glanced at Jesus, but decided not to fix him a plate. Andy disappeared a cookie in under a minute and then slowed down for the second one, pausing for a drink of milk. Gladys sat down with half a glass of skim milk, even though she had had enough dairy with the cheese sandwich. She didn’t want Andy to eat alone, though that didn’t seem to be a big concern for him.
Feeling a bit of the sugar buzz starting to expand inside him, Andy said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Jesus could be here and make you feel better?”
Noting that he had been paying attention, after all, Gladys grabbed the opportunity. “Well, in a way, he is here; and he says he does want me to feel better.”
Andy considered this as he chewed the last bite of that second cookie. “He’s here, but I can’t see him, right?”
“That’s right.” Gladys smiled and checked Jesus, out of the corner of her eye. “And he likes to use other people to do the healing, at least that’s what he’s been telling me.”
Andy’s substantial eyebrows clenched briefly, wondering how to take Gladys’s talk about hearing Jesus. Lifting another cookie in his hand, covered now with the peanut oil and crumbs from the first two, he started thinking, chewing more slowly still.
“Other people? You think he would use someone like me to help someone feel better?”
“Well, what do you say we give it a try? We can just see if he’ll do that. Make him show us what he’ll do.”
Andy grinned at Gladys’s spunky proposal, thinking it clever of her to be so confident that she could talk about Jesus that way, like she knew him and maybe he lived in her guest room or something. “Okay, let’s do that,” Andy said.
Gladys could tell that this notion was something of a game to Andy, but one look at Jesus told her that he wasn’t offended. “So, let’s just wait for Jesus to tell us how to do this, since you and I have never done it before.”
Agreeing as he chewed, Andy let his eyes start that search again, feeling that there really might be someone else in the house.
Jesus answered Gladys’s prompt. “Just have Andy put his hand on yours and say, ‘sore hips get better now.’”
Gladys looked at Jesus like he had just suggested they dance a jig in the middle of the kitchen floor, but she straightened up when she saw serious intent in his eyes. What did she know about this sort of thing anyway?
“I think he wants you to put your hand on mine,” Gladys said.
“Jesus does?”
“Yes.”
Andy put down the half cookie he was holding and started to reach for his pant leg, but Gladys caught him. “There’s a napkin right there,” she said, pointing to a fired-clay napkin holder Patty had made in high school.”
“Oh, sorry,” Andy said.
“No harm, no foul,” Gladys said.
Andy smiled. He recognized something Harry used to say all the time, especially when he would play catch with Andy, after his dad moved out, and while Harry was still up to throwing a baseball. “No harm, no foul.” Andy repeated the saying with a toothy smile, as he wiped his hands thoroughly.
“So, you just put your hand on mine, and say ‘pain in Gladys’s hips, go away.’” She had forgotten exactly what Jesus said, but felt like she got the spirit of the thing right.
The look on Andy’s face reminded Gladys of when her kids would play a trick on one of their siblings, a good-natured teasing sort of look. He was in on this game and glad to play along.
“Pain in . . . Gladys’s hips, go away.” He hesitated to say her first name, never having used it before. Gladys had forgotten to factor that in, but Andy managed.
As Andy said this, Jesus reached across the table and put his hand on Andy’s, which rested, of course, on Gladys’s. When he did that, as Gladys could plainly see, a sort of buzzing started in both her hips and, to a lesser extent, her knees as well. She turned into a startled statue, her eyes locked on Jesus’s hand.
“Hey, do you have one of those buzzers in your hand, the joking handshake buzzers?” Andy said, for he was feeling that buzzing in his hand. Whether Gladys felt it in her hand, she couldn’t remember afterward, focused instead on the soothing sensation in her legs.
Turning her focus on Andy, but missing his question, Gladys said, “I think something is happening.”
“You mean the buzzing? ‘Cause I feel this buzzing here.” Andy patted Gladys’s hand on the table gently.
“I mean the pain in my hips is going away. That buzzing is in my legs, taking the pain away.” Gladys’s voice swooped upward at the end of that statement.
Jesus laughed and Gladys looked at him, watching the laughter play in his eyes, eyes focused on her, but glancing at Andy when the boy spoke or laughed. Andy was laughing now.
“How ARE you making that buzzing,” he said, giggling the words out.
“It’s not me, it’s Jesus,” she said.
“Jesus?” Andy said a bit more hilariously. “Does he have one of those buzzers?” The idea tickled Andy more than peanut butter cookies and milk, even more than playing catch with his dad. He laughed and squirmed in his chair, his winter coat—which he still wore—swishing noisily at his movements.
And then, the buzzing stopped, and Jesus pulled his hand back. “All better now?” he said to Gladys.
“Hey!�
�� Andy said. “It stopped.”
Though he was the most simple-minded person of adult height that Gladys knew, Andy had thoroughly convinced her that her experience of seeing and hearing Jesus was real. His reaction to Jesus removing his hand was perfectly timed. He clearly knew when Jesus was touching him and when he stopped. Gladys could only sit and stare with a surprised gape on her face.
“Wow, that was weird,” Andy said. And he took a drink of milk and picked up that half cookie with his other hand. He laughed lightly as he chewed. “I don’t know how you did that,” he said through a mouth full of cookie.
“You did it more than I did,” Gladys said, with a laugh of her own. “But mostly it was Jesus.”
Andy took another drink, making his milk mustache a bit lopsided this time, and he said, “Yeah, it must have been Jesus that did that trick.”
Chapter 8
LONGING
After Andy had finished his cookies, and Gladys had seen him to the door, she waved at Mrs. Shelton, who was standing on her driveway, looking across the street at Andy’s bike. Gladys felt a twinge of guilt for keeping Andy in her house for long enough to worry his mother, but that was the only twinge she was feeling. In her hips and knees she felt no pain.
She stood in the doorway watching Andy get on his bike, hearing his mother talking to him, though not discerning the words.
All Gladys could think about was how good her legs felt, how easy it was to just stand there. She could stand there looking out the door all afternoon, she thought. Then Jesus joined her at the door, looking out at Andy and placing a hand on Gladys’s shoulder. She felt that touch just as if any person was standing there touching her, and she started thinking about that, instead of her relieved joints. She could feel Jesus with her, the gentle, warm weight of his hand penetrating her polyester blouse and sweater.
Gladys turned and met Jesus’s eyes, feeling his hand slide across her upper back and rest on her opposite shoulder. As if waking from sleep, she suddenly realized that this was real, that Jesus was real. And not just that he was really standing there looking at her in her little house in Union City, Wisconsin. She was startled to realize that he was, in fact, an actual person. And here was the proof.
As soon as the word proof occurred to her, she started to question herself, to raise the issue of her shaky sanity.
“Who says it’s shaky?” Jesus said, in response to her unspoken thought, even that frantic and fragmented thought.
Gladys blinked rapidly, turning her eyes toward Jesus’s hand on her shoulder and then back to his face. Again, she thought of how naturally Andy had responded to Jesus placing a hand on top of his and then removing it when the healing was done. And she focused her thoughts again on the sensation of painless hips and knees. She stepped forward, just missing Jesus’s toes, and then stepped back. She twisted a bit and even waggled her hips back and forth. “Harry would have laughed all day if he saw me doing that,” she thought.
“Yes, he would have,” Jesus said aloud.
Standing there, eye to eye with this long-haired stranger in a very odd costume, Gladys allowed herself to rest, to relax her guard, to quell her questions. She stood and just looked into his eyes, eyes that never wavered, never hesitated, always smiling at her.
“You’re real.”
“Yes. And so are you.”
Gladys reached up and touched the side of Jesus’s face. She felt the smoothness of his skin the fibrous roughness of his beard, and the soft cloth of his robe. Then Jesus stepped closer and wrapped his arms around her, and Gladys raised her sleepwalker arms and slowly wrapped then around the back of her impossible visitor. She allowed her weight to lean into Jesus. Gallons of tension and fear seemed to pour from her into him, as if he were a dry sponge, ready to absorb anything she would allow to leak out of her.
Then she began to weep, her tears soaking the front of his shirt, her gasping breath warming the little space where her face rested against him. Her mind tried to pull back, to ask again how this could be, to question her mental stability. But her heart wouldn’t let go of that embrace. She needed that anchor, that resting place, those arms around her. She had always needed this. She had been longing for it all her life. But she didn’t know that until now, as if all her deadening fears had coated her heart and resisted the truth about what she truly wanted, what she truly needed.
When Harry died, Gladys had hardly cried. Only once did she give herself to that urge, releasing her stopper and flushing out the sadness and grief. Now she cried without restraint. The newfound youth in her legs provided strength to stand and even to endure. But five minutes of hard crying is a lot for even a young and vigorous person. Jesus finally helped her walk to the recliner, supporting her quaking body until she could relax into that seat.
For ten minutes more, Jesus knelt next to the chair, his arms around Gladys, as much as that was physically possible from that position. Gradually, her tears abated, her sobs ceased. Gladys calmed and then fell fast asleep, emotionally exhausted.
To Gladys, the notion of Jesus—for a notion is really all he had been in her life—did not in any way approach the space where a friend can embrace you and let you sob into his shirt. Her parents had drilled into her the necessity of keeping her emotions private and contained. She had never cried on her father’s shoulder, she had seldom sobbed into her mother’s blouse, not once since she was six or seven years old. In light of this history, what had happened there between Gladys and Jesus violated a lifetime of attitudes and expectations. To some extent, sleep was an escape, as if a fuse had tripped, allowing the intensity of that series of unfamiliar experiences to soak back under ground, back with the rest of her feelings.
When Gladys woke up, it was to the sound of knocking at her front door. She lay in the reclined position in the chair, the afghan from the couch covering her from chin to toe. Jesus sat on the couch watching her. Then she heard the knocking again.
“Gladys, I need to talk to you,” said the muffled voice of the woman from across the street.
Barbara Shelton had not talked to Gladys for years, not since Harry died. While he was still alive, Harry filled in some of the places where Andy needed a man around, a father, or perhaps a grandfather. When Harry died, Barbara was sadder than Andy, who didn’t quite understand what had happened. He thought, at first, that Harry had gone away, like his father, and would come back to see him on weekends. Gladys remembered Barbara’s swollen red eyes at the reception after the funeral.
Gladys shifted her weight forward. She rose to a sitting position more easily than any time since the purchase of that chair. She realized suddenly that she had decided not to think about whether Andy would say anything to his mother. If he did speak of what happened at Gladys’s house, she had no idea just what he would say. Now she had to consider these things.
Standing and walking around the end table, Gladys had to hesitate a moment to allow the blood to flow to her head. She wasn’t used to standing up that quickly. A whole system of pumps and valves needed retraining to keep her blood flowing to where she needed it, under more mobile conditions. It felt like a good problem to have.
She pulled the front door open, and said, “Hello, Barbara. Is there a problem?” Gladys knew this was a delay tactic, but she didn’t want to explain more than she had to. She had developed this technique with her mother and perfected it with her daughter.
Barbara’s usually stolid face was red, both from the cold and from an effulgence of emotions. Gladys knew some of what this was about. But she wasn’t sure what Andy could have said, or how much he even understood.
“There may be a very big problem,” Barbara said with a tight jaw and clenched teeth. She stepped into the house where Gladys held the door open.
Gladys stepped back a bit farther than she normally would have. Something in Barbara’s demeanor called to mind a mother bear in protective mode. Gladys tried a defensive maneuver.
“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you before inviting Andy in a
nd giving him cookies.”
“Is that all that happened?” Barbara said. The tone of those words was more inquest than question.
Gladys took a full breath. Before she had fallen asleep, she had begun a major transformation of her soul. Waking up from a deep sleep to the sound of an irate mother pounding on her door set her back considerably.
“Nothing else, really,” she said in a voice that she felt lacked the clarity she had intended. She hoped Barbara couldn’t detect the lie framed by that convictionless tone.
“Why is he talking about you having a vibrating thing of some kind, and of you asking him to touch you, then?”
Suddenly, Gladys was swimming well out of her depth and the current swirling around her promised to overwhelm her, unless she struggled hard.
“Vibrating thing?” Gladys said. “Did he say ‘vibrating’ or did he say ‘buzzing’?” She returned to what she remembered Andy saying when he was at her house.
Barbara’s voice sank to half volume as she asked herself that question. “Did he say ‘vibrating’ or ‘buzzing’?” This offered the first brief slack in Barbara’s attack. Gladys could see the subtle shift in her eyes, as her neighbor consulted her memory and found something of which she wasn’t exactly sure. In that process, Barbara also considered whether the accusations she was implying might require a more definite collection of evidence.
Barbara backed up very slightly and redirected. “Then tell me what did happen here,” she said, her voice hurdling back toward attack mode.
Gladys felt trapped. She could see only one way out. The truth.
“I was feeling my hip pain a lot more today, and wanted to test something I heard about Jesus healing people.” This is when she became aware that Jesus was, once again, right next to her, as if he had remained on the couch until he, and the truth, entered the conversation.
“Jesus?” Barbara said, with a similar tone to the one Gladys used for the word, “vibrating.”
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 7
