“Okay, I’ll leave you be,” she said, still laughing. She banged into the storm door once before executing the handle turn successfully. “Oh, I think I’m feeling a bit too good,” she said, a clipped yodel lifting her voice.
Gladys didn’t even respond. She was focused on Katie. As a result, she didn’t notice what a spectacle Maureen was making, laughing and flipping her hand up and down like it was on a brand new hinge that she had just lubricated. Gladys didn’t even see Maureen turn her hinging hand toward the house as she said, “Bye, bye,” which set her off on another round of giggles.
The scowl on Patty’s face, as she looked at the strange woman trying to get into her minivan, was the first thing that alerted Gladys to potential trouble. Katie seemed to shrug off the odd behavior of the unknown woman and sprinted toward the house.
“Grandma!” She ran the last five yards with her hands lifted, as Gladys stepped out onto the porch to meet her. Now almost the same height as her grandma, Katie wrapped Gladys up in an enthusiastic hug.
She looked down at Gladys’s legs. “Your legs are all better?”
Gladys nodded, looking up at Patty as she said, “Yes they are. Which means us girls can do some shopping and go out to lunch whenever we want.”
Patty targeted that the first issue popping up in front of her. “She doesn’t need anything, Mom. You don’t have to buy her anything.”
Katie nodded her half-hearted agreement, but let the grownups work it out. She opened the storm door and held it for the two women. Her mother was carrying a dark pink overnight bag and a light pink backpack with a little yellow bear stitched on it.
Patty was not much taller than her mother. Her high-strung tendencies caused her movements to look as if the film of her life was running in fast-forward, just enough to appear unnatural and out of synch. She was wearing her hair short, like her mother, but darker than her natural color, almost brunette. Her eyes had begun collecting small crescents, starting at her slim scoop of a nose and swinging under her deep blue eyes, her father’s eyes.
From Gladys’s perspective, Jesus stepped up into the house first, followed closely by Patty. This distracted her from the tense confrontation that Patty was trying to build.
“Come on in, come on in,” Gladys was saying, she put a hand on Patty’s back as they passed into the house. That way, when Patty dropped the girly luggage in the living room, Gladys was ready for a hug.
In some families, hugging would have been quite natural, of course. Patty, however, had long stayed aloof, to keep the chips on her shoulders from getting knocked off. And Gladys had never been aggressive in pursuing her daughter. But this day was different. Gladys was different, and the layer cake of joy and surprises that she had sampled the last few days urged her into unparalleled affection.
Instead of turning toward her, when Gladys started the hug, Patty remained sideways, like someone who didn’t know what this odd custom involved. The result looked something like a small child holding a brand new giant stuffed animal, a tight squeeze around the middle and limp arms and legs above and below.
Patty was speechless. Katie laughed at her mother’s comical posture and her grandma’s bouncy joy. What Katie didn’t see, of course, was Jesus tagging into the action again. Though only Gladys saw it, Jesus stroked Patty’s hair the way one might to calm a child awakened by a nightmare. This warmed Gladys’s heart. But no one could tell what Patty was thinking.
Though Patty was certainly the daughter who resembled her grandmother more than her own mother, as if key traits skipped a generation, she was acting a bit like Gladys now. She had lost track of her deep concern over her mother’s mental health, or possible involvement in some kind of cult. The sight of an apparently drunk woman leaving the house, the undeniable evidence that her mother’s legs had been healed, and now this unexpected show of affection, booted her right out of even the fighting edge of her comfort zone. It’s hard to throw a punch while trying not to fall over in shock.
The dialog during the transition of Katie into the care of her grandmother included dozens of sentence fragments punctuated only by Katie’s laughter, which was echoed by Jesus, in Gladys’s ears. Eventually, Patty found her way back to her car. In the process, none of her objections saw the light of day, and no one was interested in prompting her to unwrap them.
Finally, Katie and Gladys stood on the porch and waved goodbye to the woman who was the squeaky trailer hitch linking their generations. To their credit, neither of them wasted a moment reflecting on the sour disposition of the woman leaving in the black sedan. They had plans for fun and didn’t want anything to interrupt.
Gladys showed Katie to her newly made bed, in the guest room, and then they sat down to look at the TV and Blu-Ray player, Katie on the floor and Gladys on the ottoman pulled up next to the TV. For now, they would just push the old tube TV back a bit, and balance the new flat screen on the space in front of it. With no toddlers in the house, this didn’t seem a dangerous compromise. Lifting the forty-three-inch replacement was enough of a strain for the two co-conspirators, to reassure them that they had made the right choice, in leaving the boulder-like old TV in place.
As expected, Katie impressed Gladys with her command of the technology, even though most of what she accomplished started from the written instructions in the slim manuals that accompanied the new electronics. By the time the equipment was in place, and working as advertised, it was time for lunch. The excitement, combined with some intense brainwork, had made Katie extra hungry.
“I made us some of your favorites,” Gladys said, enticing a girl that needed no encouragement to follow her grandma into the kitchen. To love Grandma Hight was to love being in the kitchen with her.
Jesus had remained an amused observer, and silent companion to Gladys, during this time with Katie. Perhaps he was allowing the time for just the two of them, knowing how much they had been looking forward to the weekend. Lunch, however, presented a new problem. Gladys had, of course, been insisting that Jesus eat with her, instead of just watching her eat, or being banned to another room while she ate. Though focused on Katie now, Gladys could see Jesus in her peripheral vision, as she pulled bowls and containers from the refrigerator. Jesus addressed her quandary.
“I think it will be best for me to skip this meal, Gladdy,” he said. “You know it won’t bother me, and you won’t be eating alone either.”
As Jesus said this, Katie was chatting on about a headache she had been suffering all morning, and how she hoped that eating would get rid of it, though she had been having headaches a lot lately, even when she wasn’t hungry. When Gladys tuned from Jesus back to Katie she stopped her food preparations.
“Well, I’m pretty sure that Jesus can get rid of that headache, no matter what the cause is,” Gladys said. “Mind if I put my hand on your head for a few seconds?”
Katie cocked her head a bit sideways. “I didn’t know you did things like that, Grandma. I guess it’s okay.” She was thinking what her mother would say, and remembering something she had heard about how her grandma’s legs got better. But she wasn’t connecting all fragments of evidence yet.
Gladys stepped up to her growing granddaughter and reached up to rest two fingers just below Katie’s hairline. Jesus, as Gladys expected, stepped up next to her and put his fingers in exactly the same spot. For a second, it looked like Jesus had turned into a sort of projection, because his hand disappeared where Gladys’s was. Though distracted by this optical illusion, Gladys pressed forward, to avoid confusing Katie.
“Headache, go away,” she said, not even waiting for instructions from Jesus. He beamed his approval at her methodology with a proud smile. And he healed Katie from her pain.
“Whoa, that was cool!” Katie said, recoiling her neck a bit, as if Gladys had pushed on her forehead. But both Jesus and Gladys had already started to lower their hands before her reaction.
“It just vanished, like it got sucked out of the top of my head or something,” Katie sai
d, her prepubescent voice squeaking a bit in her excitement.
“Oh, that’s great!” Gladys was far from getting tired of her supernatural successes.
“How did you do that?”
“It’s Jesus.”
“You mean, Jesus up in Heaven?”
“No, Jesus right here.” Gladys gestured toward where he stood. Katie glanced where Gladys pointed, and scowled a little.
“He’s here? How?” she asked.
Gladys chuckled. “Well, that’s been pretty hard for me to answer, but I’ve just been glad that it’s true. And I got my good legs now to prove it. And you have your head with no headache.”
Katie’s face showed a merry uncertainty that floated just above doubt.
Jesus reminded Gladys about lunch, which she took as permission to move back into territory about which she knew quite a lot more.
“Let’s have this lunch,” she said, breaking Katie out of her mystical meandering.
“That would be grand,” Katie said, using a phrase she had heard from her grandmother all her life.
Chapter 21
HAPPY
That Friday flew past in a feast of reminiscences and favorite foods, and one girlish film. Gladys loved her youngest granddaughter, and suspected she felt most attached to her because she was the youngest. But the time they spent together that weekend showed Gladys a deeper reason for her natural alliance with Katie.
At supper Friday night, Katie was twirling her spaghetti with her fork—a method her mother didn’t allow at home—and looking around the dining room. “What’s so different about your house, Grandma? Something seems very different. Did you get new paint or new curtains or something?”
Gladys looked around at her décor, which had not changed much in the last ten years. In part, she didn’t care a lot about the colors, styles and the impression things made on others. She was also unconsciously preserving her house, keeping it as it had been when Harry was alive. She was thinking those sorts of thoughts when she answered Katie.
“No, the only new things are the sheets on your bed and the TV in there, she gestured generally in the direction of the living room with her hand holding her fork. She looked down at the dark green carpet, new twenty years ago. It was probably time to replace the matted and dull flooring that covered dining room, living room and hallway.
Jesus cleared his throat, where he sat at the other end of the table. He had been right, of course, that Gladys’s focus on Katie eliminated her concern about a man sitting at the table and not eating. But she hadn’t completely forgotten that he was there. She was just used to dealing with her family members on the level of things she could touch, and that could mostly be replaced at the local mega-hardware store.
Gladys checked out that sound from Jesus, assuming that he wasn’t developing a cold or allergies. Then she realized the reason for his subtle alert. Katie glanced at the end of the table where her grandma was looking.
“It just feels more happy around here, I guess.” Katie returned to her favorite supper, which was losing its magic the more she ate. The last bit of meatball disappeared into her mouth.
“More happy?” Gladys said, as if trying to remember where she had heard that grammatically-challenged phrase. In fact, she was trying to decide how much more to tell Katie.
Katie took a drink of milk and then clarified her observation. “It’s not just that you’re more happy, with your good hips and all, or that I’m more happy, ‘cause visiting you always makes me happy. It’s sort of like your house is happy.” She twisted her mouth sideways, feeling that she wasn’t making much sense.
Jesus started to chuckle. That told Gladys that it was alright to let Katie deeper into her secret. By now, Gladys had absorbed the feeling that, if Jesus was laughing there was nothing to worry about.
“Well, I’d like to tell you a bit more about what’s been happening,” Gladys started. She sipped her water to clear her voice and to figure out how to say it. “Remember that I told you it was Jesus here with me that gave us the healings we had, you know, my legs and your headache?”
Katie set down her fork and said, “Uhuh.” She picked up her last piece of garlic bread and crunched through the buttery crust.
“I really do mean that Jesus is here, and actually that I can see and hear him. He’s sitting right there in that chair,” Gladys said, turning toward Jesus and nodding in his direction.
Katie stopped chewing. She kept her eyes on Gladys even as she turned her head slowly toward the chair against the dining room window. Her gaze jumped from her grandma to that chair. Then Jesus did something that surprised both of them. He reached up and pushed the curtains next to him, as if a wind had blown through the tightly closed window.
Jumping in their seats, Gladys and Katie both started to laugh. Katie’s laugh was the nervous sort that one gets when the nurse tells you a joke just before sticking you with a needle. Gladys suspended her breathing for a second, as she waited for Katie to settle in with the idea.
Seeing Katie in her own suspended state, Gladys tried an explanation. “I don’t know why he did that with the curtain. He’s been very polite with all my friends from church, and the people at the store. Usually he’s not spooky at all.”
Katie giggled some more, still focused on that apparently empty chair. “How do you know it’s Jesus?” She was thinking about some scarier alternatives.
Gladys looked at him straight on and said, “He looks just like I would expect Jesus to look. And when he first showed up I didn’t feel scared at all, even with a strange man showing up in my house.” Gladys turned back to Katie, sitting across the table from her. “And then there’s the healing things, and the encouraging messages he gives me for people. He tells me things about people that I don’t have any way of knowing.”
This focused a question Katie had left drifting in the periphery of her mind. “Did he tell you something about Mom? Because she was asking Dad about something that she was sure he had told you, and he swore he hadn’t.”
“Yes, that was sort of a surprise to me,” Gladys said. “Jesus didn’t tell me he was gonna do that. I could have told him it would upset her.” Gladys consulted Jesus again, and he laughed at her unintended irony.
“I could tell you something that Katie hasn’t told you, to let her know I’m real,” he said.
Now Gladys consulted Katie. “He says he can tell me something you haven’t told me about, to show you he’s real.”
Not even twelve yet, and having no sinister secrets, Katie wanted to see this trick. “Okay,” she said.
Jesus’s eyes focused on Katie even as he spoke to Gladys. “There’s a girl on her soccer team that’s been bullying Katie, making crude jokes about maturing to be a woman. It really bothers Katie, but she doesn’t feel like she can tell anyone, because she doesn’t want to be a tattle tale, and she doesn’t think the adults will handle it well.”
Gladys had followed Jesus’s gaze back to Katie, and looked sympathetically at her as Jesus spoke.
“What? What is he saying?” Katie said, already on her way to believing.
Gladys did her best to repeat what Jesus had said, as accurately as possible, distracted along the way by Katie’s eyes enlarging and her thin eyebrows stretching upward. Gladys was afraid the revelation was too personal.
As soon as she finished reporting what Jesus had said, he added something. “And I want Katie to know that it hurts me when Darla hurts her, and that nothing would ever stop me from loving her.”
Katie had already started to tear up, overflowing with the combination of her grandma’s secret and Jesus’s awareness of her own darkest trial. When Gladys, somewhat tearfully, added Jesus’s loving assurance, the catharsis began.
Gladys recognized the feeling. She reached across the table with both hands, holding Katie’s right hand, which she could reach. Jesus stood up and squatted next to Katie, wrapping an arm around her. When he did that, it looked to Gladys as if Katie had just found a warm blanket o
n a cold night. She could see Katie snuggle into that embrace, even if Katie couldn’t see the one embracing her.
Gladys slipped out of her seat and circled the table to stand on the other side of Katie. “I think he’s healing your heart where it hurts,” she said. “I’ve seen him do that for some people.” She was including herself, but didn’t feel the need to specify.
Katie didn’t need to say anything. She had all that she wanted. And her instincts told her to just stay with that flame of emotions, and that feeling of someone smothering the fire with cool fresh water.
After a few minutes, the tears stopped and Katie sat up and turned her red and glassy eyes to Gladys. “This is a miracle, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gladys said. “It’s been one miracle after another since Jesus came to visit.”
As they cleared away the supper, and each enjoyed a slice of cherry pie, Gladys described her days with Jesus. He piped in a few times to remind her of things they did together, things he knew Katie would like to know. He seemed to know her even better than Gladys, which pinched the adoring grandmother a little.
When Jesus sensed this rise of emotions in Gladys he suggested something. “I think you should go down to Naperville more often. You especially ought to see Katie play soccer. She’s a great passer and her passes lead to goals in every game.”
Gladys told Katie what Jesus had said. This stopped the prolific little athlete in her tracks. Katie stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, slightly pigeon toed, a dishtowel in her hand. She tried to picture Jesus at one of her games, standing unnoticed in the small crowd of parents. Then she turned back to Jesus’s suggestion.
“I would love to have you come to one of my games. I never asked before, ‘cause I knew you don’t like to drive so far, and ‘cause I thought it might be hard for you to get comfortable on the sidelines.”
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 20
