“Let’s go inside.”
“I like it out here. Let’s have another snowball fight.”
“Your father will be disappointed if we miss his sermon.” Mother wrapped one arm around daughter, and they sauntered hip to hip toward the door. “You know how he always likes us to tell him that it was good.”
“Yeah, Mama. I know.”
But Theia wondered, as they entered the front vestibule, whether she’d ever be able to know again that God and faith were good.
Chapter Five
Theia spent all Sunday afternoon digging in her cedar chest, looking for her hair ribbons.
They had to be here somewhere.
She found a pink plastic toy telephone, three of her own baby sleepers, and a tulip quilt that had been hand stitched by Joe’s great-grandmother. She found a little purse made of white rabbit fur, a pair of gloves, and a box of silkworms someone had sent Edna from China.
But no hair ribbons.
If they weren’t in the cedar chest, she didn’t know where she might have put them. Maybe they had gotten put away with some of the girls’ baby things. Maybe they were still attached to some ancient pair of shoes. Maybe she’d accidentally stuck them in the pocket of some old dress, something she’d dropped off at Browse and Buy.
Theia tried to remember when she had last seen them. She poked her head further into the chest and kept digging.
“What are you looking for?” Kate flipped off the light to the bathroom and came out.
Theia spoke from beneath a pile of wool blankets. “Those hair ribbons I was telling you about.”
“Here. I’ll help.”
“I’m almost to the bottom. I don’t think they’re here.”
“What’s this?” Kate held up one of the sleepers.
Theia glanced up and kept digging. “That was mine. Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve saved your sleepers, too. I’ve got them put away in a box in the attic.”
“I like it when you save things.”
“Good. Be sure and tell your father that next time he’s in the mood to clean out the garage.” Theia pulled out her head and brushed off her hands. “I wish I could find those. I really wanted to get them out before I start chemotherapy tomorrow.”
“I’ve got to go, Mom. I promised Jaycee I’d help her with her English project.”
“That’s okay.”
“But I promised I would help you find them.”
“I haven’t seen those ribbons in years, Kate.” Theia said, her face flush with disappointment. “I’m afraid they’re gone for good.”
Joe and Theia lay side by side in the bed, Joe with his big study Bible propped open on his chest. Theia with the pillow plumped up beneath her neck as if she’d fallen asleep.
He knew from her breathing that she hadn’t.
Joe turned a page in his Bible, looked at it, turned back. He had no idea what he’d just read. “You want me to go with you tomorrow?”
“Go with me where?”
“To chemo.”
“There isn’t any need for you to. They say I won’t feel bad until I’ve had several sessions. The effects are cumulative.”
“I’d still like to be there.”
Theia readjusted the pillow beneath her head and snuggled down deeper. “I don’t want you to come, Joe.”
When she pushed him away like this, it made Joe feel more helpless than ever. “I want to support you, Theia. I want to be there for you.”
“I was asleep. You woke me up.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She sighed, but didn’t disagree with him.
“Was the sermon okay today?”
“It was good.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“It was.”
“Frank Martin looked bored. And Sue Masterson couldn’t stop drying off Dillon with Kleenex the entire time.”
“Hmm.”
She answered with brusque, short sentences, his cue that she wanted him to be quiet. He shut the Bible with a crack and laid it on his bedside table. Then he waited, watching, hoping his wife would turn to him, only she didn’t.
“Theodore?”
“Hmm?”
“How long do we have to wait before…” He couldn’t figure out exactly how to say it. “Well, you know.”
He heard her voice catch. “We don’t have to wait if we don’t want to.”
But she didn’t move toward him. She didn’t move at all.
“Or we can.”
“Yes.”
A good five minutes of silence passed between them.
Outside the parsonage a hay truck rattled past, carrying its two-ton limit, on its way to deliver a load to one of the local ranches. The lampshade rattled. They could feel the truck’s wheels rumbling up through the floor. Joe stared at the ceiling above them; Theia stared at the wall on her side of the bed.
He thought of what he would do, loving her the way he did, if he ever had to go through one day without her.
She thought of what it might feel like to be gone from this earth, to be looking down upon them from heaven. She wondered what would happen to the girls if she died, and who would take care of Joe. So much she’d miss. All their silly jokes. Sewing those maddening patches onto Heidi’s Girl Scout vest.
Sorting Joe’s socks.
The weight of everything they carried together tonight felt like the truck outside with its huge load of hay, running across their hearts, crushing them both.
“Theia.” This time, Joe couldn’t keep himself from reaching out to her. He turned back the covers and placed his hand in the crook of her shoulder, bunching her nightgown in a way that had always given him pleasure. Beneath the cool sheer of the fabric, she felt the way a wife should feel to her husband; warm, compliant, soft, everything he needed. The slightest bit of pressure now, and she would roll toward him, loop her arms around his neck.
“My b-b-breasts aren’t there anymore,” she sobbed up at him as she wrapped her forearms around the nape of his neck. “You sh-shouldn’t expect me to be b-b-beautiful anymore. I’m all c-cut away.”
He wanted so badly to reassure her, but his words rang hollow in his own ears. “That doesn’t matter to me.”
“It does matter. You’ll have to help me change the dressing soon, and then you’ll see it. It’s awful.”
“But you are still you inside. You’ll still be beautiful, Theia.”
“My body looks like someone tried to sew up the corners of a cushion.”
“None of that makes any difference to me.”
“It will. I hate cancer. It isn’t fair.”
“You know what makes you beautiful to me? I’ve watched you give birth to my babies. That’s what makes you beautiful.”
“Why would God make this happen to me when He also made it happen to my mother?”
He didn’t know why he made the next mistake. He’d stopped thinking perhaps. He was enjoying winning her over, saying all the right things. “I know how goofy you acted when we were young. That’s what makes you beautiful to me. Because I was with you the time you stood up on the roller coaster at Lagoon. That makes you beautiful. Because I know you’re going to be all snaggletoothed and funny-looking when we both get old together. That’s what makes you—”
It took Joe a full ten seconds to realize the horrible, wrong thing he’d said. He froze. For a moment she just lay there, staring up at him like she hadn’t heard him right. As realization hit, her countenance crumpled. Her chin began to quiver. Her mouth contorted. Her eyes welled with tears.
“Theodore, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She shoved him off, cast the rest of the blankets aside, and jumped out of bed. “How could you say that? How could you talk about growing old?”
“I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
She pulled on a sweatshirt over her nightgown. She stepped into her snow boots and shoved her arms into her coat.
�
�Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. I’m just going.”
He was up and beside her. “I’m coming, too.”
“No, you aren’t. I want to be alone.”
“It’s the middle of the night. You can’t go out there by yourself. It’s cold.”
She screamed the words at him. “I’m a big girl, Joe. I go out walking, at all times of day and night, by myself. Just because you’ve said something stupid doesn’t give you the right to come along with me!”
He couldn’t stop himself. He’d borne his own burdens too long. “How can you act like this is just about you? If something happens to you, Theia, it happens to both of us. If you die—” He stood in the middle of the room, amid blankets that had fallen to the floor in angry knots, his hands balled into incapable fists at his side. “If you die, everything for me ends, too. You have to think about us together, not just you.”
Theia walked away and didn’t look back. She shut the door soundly behind her. Joe sank to the side of the bed, feeling totally cut off from his wife, wondering what had happened to the woman he’d been able to share everything with. “Please, God,” he whispered aloud. “Please, God.”
But that was as far as he could go. When he tried to find words to speak his heart, he found he wasn’t able.
Theia’s hurt hammered with every beat of her heart, a rhythmic throb of grief. She pulled her coat tighter as she stumbled across the unbroken snow, her boots stamping waffle patterns behind her.
When she looked over her shoulder, she could just make out the shape of the church and the parsonage and her dad’s greenhouse, pink-washed in the moonlight. Theia stared up at stars, pinpricks in the night sky. She listened, heard only unerring silence, only the rustle of breeze in the trees. She stood in the midst of the snowfield, her lanky shadow lengthening in the moonlight, her own steps solitary behind her, and cried. “I c-can’t do this. I can’t be strong for everybody else. I can’t even be strong for m-me.”
So many things she needed…to be held close and rocked, to hear the affirmations that everyone around her could no longer give. To hold her children close and know that she would be alive to enjoy their growing.
“You’ve got so much food here,” Laura Jones had said last week when she’d brought over lasagna. “You aren’t going to have to cook for a year.”
She cried because Joe said she’d be beautiful when she was old. She cried because Laura Jones had taken stock of her refrigerator.
You won’t have to cook for a year.
Did it occur to anybody that she might want to cook? That she might hold dear a hundred different chores because nothing guaranteed that she’d be around for those chores in another year.
I didn’t want Joe to see me, to touch me. And maybe that’s one less time for him to touch me in the time that we have left.
“Nobody understands, Lord! Nobody understands.”
How she yearned for her father’s arms. Not the feeble, aged way he held her lately, but the strong, big way he’d hugged her when she’d been a little girl. When he’d lifted her to the mirror so she could match her face to his. When he’d picked her up and carried her upstairs to sing “Purple People Eater.” “I c-can’t do this.” Her nose ran, and tears rolled down her jaw to soak the collar of her coat. She did nothing to stop them. “I’m mad at You! Mad. How could You do this?”
She’d never been so afraid in all her life.
She’d never been so angry.
“Why would I have to drag my own two children through this?”
Clearly, as clearly as if a friend touched her on the shoulder and said, “Look and see,” Theia saw her eighth birthday. A truck from Preston Lumber had turned into the alley, with a crane on it so big she thought it might knock the neighbor’s fence down. The crane lifted her new playhouse, its wood fragrant and stark, into the corner beside the patio.
Her daddy hugged her.
Her mama carried out boxes of doll furniture.
“Here are curtains.” Her mother handed her a box. “You want to hang them up?”
“She’s going to have to wait fifteen minutes or so, Edna.” Harry waggled a screwdriver in the air. “I don’t have the curtain rods hung yet.”
She ran from one window to the other and peered in. “Can I bring my dolls out here, Mama?”
“Of course you can. That’s what it’s for. A place they can live.” Her mother held out something flat in her palm. “Here’s something else.”
There in her hand lay a doll-sized embroidery framed in a hoop, carefully signed and dated: Jesus Loves Me, This I Know. Mama kissed Theia on the forehead. “Now it will feel like home.”
That had been a long, long time ago.
No dolls anymore, but real daughters.
No tiny wooden furniture, but a living room of Thomasville instead.
Jesus Loves Me….
Do You? Do You really? Because if You do, why would You take Mama away? Why would You let it happen to her, and then to me, too?
The childhood images faded away, replaced by cold, stone reality. Dr. Sugden, aligning the charts and the diagram flat on his desk for her to see. Class IIA cancer. Upper right quadrant of the right breast.
“Not the sort of cancer that goes away without a fight,” he said. “The sort that, if you live, you live with. The sort of cancer that if you survive it makes you certain that you are a survivor.”
Where are You in this, Father? I can’t find You, no matter how hard I try.
If He loved you, if He cared about you, none of this would have happened. A God who loves His children wouldn’t let anything like this come into your life.
I HAVE DRAWN YOU WITH LOVING-KINDNESS. I HAVE LOVED YOU WITH AN EVERLASTING LOVE.
That means He isn’t there at all, don’t you see? If He were there, you wouldn’t feel like He wasn’t. You wouldn’t have this awful emptiness inside. He’d be beside you, every step of the way. It’s easy to tell that He isn’t.
WHO SHALL SEPARATE YOU FROM THE LOVE OF CHRIST? SHALL TROUBLE OR HARDSHIP OR PERSECUTION…?
Fool. How could you believe such a ridiculous thing after what happened to your mother?
The lurid, dreadful voice in her head drowned out every other sound, every other thought, as she stood alone in the snow.
Her cheeks were wet from crying. She turned back toward the house and toward the bedroom where her husband would keep his back toward her, pretending to sleep. Her breath came as mere wisps of frost.
And her heart broke in the icy darkness.
Chapter Six
Harry Harkin lay wide-awake in his bed for the third night in a row.
Why can’t I stop thinking, Lord? Why won’t my mind shut down for a while?
He couldn’t look at his daughter, at all those gauze bandages he knew were wrapped around her chest and her heart like armor, without thinking of Edna, of Edna’s bandages, Edna’s faith.
Harry didn’t have to reach for the clock. When he woke up like this, he always knew the time: 3 a.m. Right on the money.
Last night when he’d been jolted out of sleep, he’d been stupid enough to punch the button. The clock spoke aloud, a woman’s tinny, electronic voice from this clock he’d bought at K-Mart because he was getting old and he couldn’t see in the dark without finding his spectacles.
“The time is three-oh-three a.m.”
This morning, he didn’t ask the confounded thing again.
He knew.
For six weeks after Edna died, Harry wouldn’t touch her things. He’d left her belongings right where she’d arranged them, small cherished altars that kept him feeling close to his wife even after she’d gone. The small blue jar of Vick’s VapoRub on her nightstand. A basket of Betsy McCall paper dolls. The crumpled hanky that still smelled of Emeraude. Her favorite pearl earbobs. As if she’d come back for them tomorrow, poke them in her pocketbook, laugh at him for thinking she might not need them anymore.
Then had come the day when he couldn’t bear h
er things sitting around any longer. He’d swept through the house like a drill sergeant, his anger so tangible and hard that he’d taken no prisoners. Sweep, into the box everything went. Family photos that she’d loved. Notes from the children. The grocery list he’d kept like a shrine on the counter, the last one she had scribbled in her own hand: “Don’t forget laundry detergent, ground beef, toilet paper.”
Gone.
The Vicks and the bottle of Emeraude. Purses and hankies and even her favorite red polka-dot apron.
Gone.
He scrounged through the laundry room shelves, searching for packing tape. When he couldn’t find anything better, he sealed the box shut with black electrical tape instead. He wanted this sealed. Finished.
Over and done with.
Lord, why the urge to see what’s inside the box now? Why, after all these years?
He’d endured. He’d made precarious peace with his heavenly Father, if only to bring himself to a place of somewhat baffled acceptance of Edna’s death.
Wouldn’t digging through Edna’s personal effects open wounds again, Father? Can’t I keep those old hurts sealed in the recesses of my heart? I know myself. If I let myself relive that now, I stand to lose the hope I still have for my daughter.
He reached toward the nightstand and thumped the button on the clock.
“The time is three-oh-two a.m.”
A shadow flitted past his window. Harry sat up and fumbled for his bifocals. He saw Theia trudging through the snow toward the parsonage. He watched as she backhanded her nose with a mitten. She’d been crying.
The time is now, his heart pulsed to him in its underlying, faultless rhythm. The time is now.
None of us can go on like this, Father. What is it that You want me to do?
That afternoon so long ago, he’d backed the Fairlane out of the garage, propped up the ladder, and stowed Edna’s things as far back as he could get them into the corner. He’d moved that box with him three times. After all these years, he’d neither unfastened it nor looked inside.
No sense in mistaking an old man’s folly for the Spirit of the Lord.
Mothers and Daughters: An Anthology Page 5
