“I love you too, Kitten,” Gladys said, using her pet name, as her granddaughter hung up.
Whirling through the implications of this new prospect, Gladys crossed the possibility that she didn’t need to meet with Sister Alison after all. Then she checked herself and remembered she had two weeks to get ready for Katie, and realized that, when the excitement wore off, she would still have to deal with the saw-tooth edges to her regret at sending Jesus away.
Taking time to brush her hair, put on some basic makeup and even add a bit of jewelry, including the little kitten pin that Katie gave her for Christmas, Gladys prepared more thoroughly for meeting the sister than the priest. As far as she was concerned, the difference was simply avoiding the embarrassment of the last time, when she realized she had shown up in the clothes that she had worn to scrub the basement floor.
The elation from Katie’s call smothered a large part of the swirling anxiety over her afternoon meeting. Gladys got in the car with just enough time to make the meeting, barring tractors, of course. She missed the last turn to the retreat center, as she considered what things she could do with Katie, now that her granddaughter was a bit older and her own hips were quite a bit younger. The prospect, though very unspecific, warmed her and distracted her from the sign at the bottom of the long driveway up to the main building of the retreat center.
Finally standing at the reception desk at five minutes past two, she waited once again for an answer to the long “ping” that hung in the air over the little welcome bell. On Friday, the receptionist wore jeans and a long pink, stretched-out sweater, which hung off one shoulder, revealing a purple top that looked like a leotard.
“Oh, hello again,” said the smiley young woman. “Are you seeing Sister Alison today?”
Before Gladys could answer, a woman’s voice sounded from the echoey hall behind her. “Hello, Gladys?”
Turning to address the inquiry, Gladys laid eyes on a pale woman of forty or so, with long straight brown hair. Something about her seemed shiny. Perhaps it was just her milky complexion and light blue eyes.
“Oh, yes,” Gladys said.
“I’m Alison Shockey. I believe we’re meeting today.”
“Yes,” Gladys said, again stupefied by unspoken questions of protocol. Father Bob had clearly called her, “Sister Alison,” when he suggested Gladys consider seeing her as a spiritual director. But, then, everyone seemed to recognize Father Bob by his title, even though he wanted just to be called, “Bob.”
Alison didn’t seem to need more of an introduction. She held one hand toward Gladys and the other extended behind her. “Come this way, if you will,” she said.
Gladys lowered her head just a little and pressed forward, past her fears and objections.
At least part of her motivation, was a need to make amends. If she believed in purgatory, she might have thought in terms of purging her sins by this penance, this trail through tense unfamiliar territory.
“How has your day been so far?” Alison said, as they passed over the glossy tile floor, between walls heavily paneled in golden oak.
Gladys thought of her call from Katie. “Actually, it’s been a wonderful day. I had a happy surprise from my youngest granddaughter. She’s coming to spend Easter weekend with me,” she said.
Alison reflected the beaming look that overtook Gladys’s face when she spoke of Katie’s visit. “Oh, that sounds great. You weren’t expecting a visit?”
“No. Her mother discouraged any hope in that direction, last time I talked to her,” Gladys said.
Alison noted the way Gladys referred to her own daughter as “her mother,” but kept her smile in place, allowing only her clear blue eyes to narrow slightly. “So you have plans for what you two girls will be doing over the weekend?”
Gladys chuckled. Though Alison’s reference to “two girls” might have seemed disrespectful to some, to Gladys it was entirely appropriate. When she was with Katie, it was like she was a girl again, or at the very least someone who vicariously enjoyed her granddaughter’s girlish whims.
“I’m still cooking that up,” Gladys said, in answer to Alison’s question. As they stepped onto a carpeted floor, through a little waiting room, and into another book-lined office, Gladys opened part of her dilemma regarding that weekend. “You see, I used to have these really sore hips and bad knees,” she said.
Alison didn’t interrupt, only gesturing toward a rosy microfiber armchair in front of the desk. She pulled up a straight- backed, upholstered chair facing Gladys.
“With my limitations from all that pain, I wasn’t able to be as active with Katie as I’d like to be. Now everything is different, so I have to figure out what that means.”
“You had surgery?” Alison said, though her tone sounded doubtful, her last word fading, like the sound of a car passing quickly on the highway.
Gladys laughed a chuckling little laugh, savoring the surprise she was about to reveal to Sister Alison. “No, actually, Jesus and the boy who lives across the street healed me of all my pain. My doctor says my hips look like I’m only fifty years old again. And you might have guessed that I’m a few days older than that.” She continued her close-kept laughter.
“Really?” Alison sounded as excited as Gladys did when Katie gave her the news of her visit. “The boy across the street?”
“Well, Jesus said he generally doesn’t do that stuff on his own, he wanted me to find someone who would sorta put a hand on me and get in on the deal, or something.” Gladys’s explanation fragmented at the end as she realized she had skipped right into the center of her reason for being there, without a proper prelude.
Alison sought that back-story. “When did he say this to you?”
“Well, it was when he showed up at my house earlier this week. I just started seein’ him standin’ there and talkin’ to me, after I first heard him makin’ noises around the place, like he lived there and was just goin’ about his business.” The excitement of Katie’s planned visit, Gladys’s pain-free hips, and the bright cheer with which Alison absorbed this story, combined to release Gladys’s telling, with the uninterrupted enthusiasm of a college student who’s been combining coffee and energy drinks a bit too liberally.
“Father Bob said you had an unusual encounter with Jesus, but left it for you to describe the details,” said Alison, scribbling rapidly on her legal pad, which she propped on one knee.
“Yeah, I meant to let that out a bit more carefully. I know it’s unusual, and even a little crazy, sort of. But that’s why I wanted to talk to someone. My pastor was okay with my story, but didn’t feel like he had much to contribute on it, so he sent me here.”
“Your pastor? At what church?”
“That’s the Bible Church, Pastor Heskett. He’s new there, and kinda more liberal than the old pastor, if that’s the right word. But he thought you folks would have more of an idea about this thing that happened with me and Jesus.”
Alison kept writing. She nodded and then looked up at Gladys. “So, tell me about this visit from Jesus.” Her voice hopped and skipped just a little too much for that question to sound simply clinical.
“Hmmm,” Gladys said. With Father Bob, she hadn’t gotten to narrate the story properly, and Pastor Hesket wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about it as Alison appeared. Her obvious openness ignited the story teller in Gladys, that part of her that read to her grandkids when she got a chance, the part of her that liked to get a laugh among the women at her Bible study.
Even with side-tracks and back-tracks, Gladys only took twenty minutes to describe her monumental experience. Jesus hadn’t been around all that long, she realized in the telling and expanding of her narrative. The big bright eyes with which Alison continued to receive her story, began to excite Gladys about the significance of hearing and seeing Jesus. That excitement almost muted the remorse she still felt. Almost.
When she finished recounting the confrontation with Barbara, from across the street, and reached the conclusion of Jesus�
��s visit, she slowed down and allowed her words to drag along the ground, interrupting her flight and forcing her to a hard landing.
“So, I looked at him and told him,” Gladys said, hesitating out of shame, instead of dramatic effect, “I told him I didn’t want to see and hear him anymore.” She looked at Alison, glancing at her eyes, but letting contrition sink her gaze down over the sister’s pale pink blouse and to her light gray slacks. Before she reached Alison’s shoes, the sound of compassion in the other woman’s voice lifted her eyes.
“Oh, Gladys. You must be feeling awful about that. I can see how much you loved having him where you could see and hear him, and to send that away under such pressure from your confrontation. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
Instead of watching her roll around in the muck of her guilt, or even exposing the sinfulness of her rejection of the Son of God, Alison reached right into Gladys’s deepest pain, past her shame. Gladys really missed having Jesus with her and feared she would never see him like that again. And, though its approach was entirely different, Gladys released another storm of tears, to rival the one Father Bob witnessed just the day before.
In those tears, an additive element from her loss of Harry was unavoidable. Where she kept her tears under control at the funeral and the wake, and even restrained herself for her own protection in private, she now loosed the firehose of emotions she had been holding back since that day Harry’s heart ceased to beat. It felt to her as if Jesus’s disappearance was a sort of drain opener for her to release all the stuff that had backed up behind the loss of her life-long friend and husband.
For her part, Alison dealt out tissues with practiced pace and accuracy, never taking her eyes off Gladys. Under her breath, she uttered prayers that Gladys couldn’t hear past her own sobbing, sniffling and blowing.
Gladys was glad she wasn’t alone. She knew that she was safer letting those emotions run free now, with someone there to prop her up and keep her from falling into the torrent that poured out of her heart and drained her of all that energy she had gained from her call with Katie.
Finally catching her breath a little, Gladys felt she needed to let Alison in on all that was behind this release of emotional pressure, as if she was afraid the younger woman would think she was overreacting.
“It’s not just Jesus going away,” she said, still sobbing at half the intensity. “It’s my Harry being gone, too, that’s got me so torn up.” And she ramped up a bit, before clamping back down and doubling her efforts at demolishing the remainder of the tissues in the box.
“Oh, Gladys. That’s a lot to be holding onto all this time.” Alison slid forward in her seat and rested her hands on Gladys’s knees, now that the tissue box was under Gladys’s management and Alison’s legal pad had slipped down next to her chair.
When Alison made that contact, Gladys noticed a slight buzzing in her knees again. This time, however, it didn’t stay in her legs, but coursed up to her stomach and into her chest. Warmth soaked into her heart and clarity opened her mind. She knew, suddenly, that Jesus really hadn’t gone away. And she knew that she was feeling his presence again through Alison’s hands. This realization started another round of tears.
Gladys had never in her long life cried as much as she had in those two days. Even the five-year-old Gladys, whose puppy was run over by a tractor, wasn’t allowed to cry that hard and that long. It just wasn’t acceptable in her family. She not only learned to bottle up her tears, as a girl, she knew she had to repress all her feelings, like a polite diner concealing a series of pending burps.
When she turned eight years old, her father took her into Fairbury for her birthday, and offered to buy her a new dress. She stood in the store, looking at the display of girls’ dresses in the corner, casting only furtive glances at the display in the window, where a frilly pink and white dress stood to tempt every little girl. She wanted the pink dress, but she knew better than to ask for such a luxury, such pleasure selfishly bestowed on her alone. Instead, she pointed to a plaid dress, with a white collar, the sensible dress for a girl in school and in church. At that age, she didn’t consciously notice how her father stared at that dress in the window, as if he doubted his little girl really wanted the ordinary dress. But he didn’t say anything, even more practiced at constraint than was his daughter.
Now, in Sister Alison’s office, Gladys asked for what she really wanted, dumping all those years of self-imposed emotional deprivation.
“I want him back,” she said. “I want him to come back to see me.”
Though Gladys had last mentioned missing Harry, Alison understood that Gladys had turned now to her loss of the visible and audible presence of Jesus. She opened the obvious question.
“Have you asked him to come back?”
Gladys fixed her eyes on Alison the same way she might have if the younger woman had asked whether she had tried to flap her arms in order to fly. Then Gladys’s startled eyes and tight lips softened and she saw the sanity of the question.
“Can I do that?” Gladys said. “I mean, I didn’t ask for him to show up in the first place. And then . . .” She couldn’t say it again, that she had sent him away.
Alison tightened her grip on Gladys’s knees. “Of course you can ask. The worst he could say is ‘no.’ ”
Gladys sorted through the simple logic of that assurance, certain that a clearer head than hers would see instantly why that wouldn’t work. Then she lifted the biggest rock in her path and called it by name.
“But I told him I didn’t want it anymore. I sent him away.”
“You didn’t send him away. He won’t leave us no matter what we say. But he did honor your choice to no longer see and hear him so clearly. Who’s to say that you can’t just as easily ask him to become visible to you again?”
Gladys thought she, for one, could say that, but decided not to push that point.
She tried another obstacle, testing its weight. “I have to confess my sin first, don’t I? Shouldn’t I have to say I’m sorry for sending him . . . I mean telling him I didn’t want to see him anymore?”
“We should freely confess our sins whenever we become aware of them,” Sister Alison said. “But I’m not so sure that you sinned in what you said. Maybe you did, I guess, but that’s not obvious to me. He knows that what he did for you was overwhelming, something totally past anything you ever expected. I think he understands why you did it, whether it counts as a sin or not.”
Alison’s optimism about Gladys’s prospects prompted Gladys to consider whether this was something she wanted to do alone, or in the company of her new spiritual director. It did sort of seem like the kind of thing one could do with a spiritual director, as far as she could tell.
Seeing Gladys’s uncertainty, Alison guessed the source. “I’d be glad to pray along with you, if you like. But it would also be okay to go home and do it by yourself.”
It occurred to Gladys that Alison might want to be part of something so remarkable, and the moral support seemed like a valuable commodity to her as well.
“I’d rather do it here, with you,” she said, at barely half volume. Her bangs, which were due for a trim, had fallen over her eyebrows, as she sat with her head cast down during those tears. She looked through the spikey tips of hair in front of her eyes at Alison’s expectant face, eyebrows high and a smile just waiting at the corners of her mouth.
Alison patted Gladys’s knees once and then slipped back into her chair. “Alright. Can I get you some water first?”
Gladys was on the verge of dehydration, after all of those tears and blown tissues. She was glad for some fresh water and a chance to take a few of those deep breaths again. Once she was done with that, and seated across from Alison again, her back straight and eyes clear, Gladys looked at the younger woman for direction.
“How about I pray for you for a moment and then you just talk to Jesus and tell him what you want to say?” Alison said.
Gladys liked the sound of that, expecting that Alison c
ould get the momentum going the right direction, before it was her turn to take the chance of asking for what she really wanted.
When Alison took her own deep breath, after they had both dutifully closed their eyes, Gladys bowing her head and folding her hands. She expected Alison to start praying aloud. But, instead, Alison waited for nearly half a minute, just long enough for Gladys to wonder if she had missed some kind of cue, or misunderstood what they were doing. She started to form the first words of her own prayer, and had just begun to open her mouth to speak, when Alison finally began her audible petition.
“Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus, for the way you blessed Gladys earlier this week, with the wonderful sight and sound of you, right there in her house. You are so generous! What a blessing you gave. And I know that you are still generous, and I believe you want to do more with Gladys, so I pray that you will give her the sense of forgiveness she needs, the feeling of permission that she needs, and the courage to tell you exactly what she wants. I know you’re ready; help us to get ready, too.”
Gladys had never heard a prayer like that in all her church-going life. And the strangeness of it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Alison’s Catholic faith either. But the strangeness began to feel more and more appropriate, the longer Gladys sat there mulling what Alison had said and the tone with which she said it. Gladys wanted to pray like that, and decided to give it a try, like a dance student following the instructor’s steps right there on the spot.
“Yes, Jesus, ah Lord, that was really very kind of you to come and keep me company and help me carry my groceries, and then to heal up my hips and knees and all. That was quite a thing,” Gladys said. She struggled with the ironic feeling of performance anxiety over trying to imitate a prayer that lacked all sense of performance. But she soldiered on.
“I know you probably aren’t as mad at me for what I said to you as I was worried you would be. I know you understand me, even when I’m scared and foolish.” She paused here, wondering whether she could say that about herself. “I mean, if that’s really what was going on with all that.” After another gulp of air, Gladys found more resolve, and picked up her petition again. “I really miss seeing and hearing you, as you probably know. I mean, sure, you know. And you know I do want to see you again like that, don’t you?” This was as much as Gladys could muster. She halted there, rather abruptly.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 11
