Pascal's Wager
Page 21
He was about to break down already. What was I supposed to do—slap him and tell him to snap out of it?
I put my hand on top of his. “Okay, Max. You stay here with Mother, and I’ll go alone.”
He smothered both our hands with his other one, so that we now had a large pile of fingers and palms on the tabletop.
“God bless you for that, Jill. I’ll do anything else that you want me to do, so help me I will. But not that. You understand?”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s Kleenex over there on the counter.”
He untangled the hand pile and crossed the kitchen to blow his nose.
“I want to ask you something, Max,” I said.
“Anything. You want more mortadella?”
“No. You’ve mentioned God a couple of times in this conversation. Have you always done that and I’ve just missed it, or is that a new development?”
Max stuffed the used Kleenex into the trash can. “He’s in here.” He tapped his forehead. “Lately He’s in there more and more. I’m asking Him: What are you doing up there, huh? I mean, excuse me, but we got problems down here. What’s going on?”
“Do you get any answers?” I said.
He came over and stood, hands pressed on the table. One lock of dark hair was falling over his forehead as usual, and his big chest was heaving under the silk shirt. He was like a character in a Brontë novel—and yet he was all too real.
“You are my answer,” he said.
“Me,” I said.
“You are the answer to almost every prayer I have prayed. You moved in with your mother like I wanted. You’re taking care of her like I prayed for. The only thing you haven’t done is take this whole nightmare away. You haven’t done that yet.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Max,” I said.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t been the answer to the rest of his prayers either and that, in fact, it had all been blind luck because I had no idea what I was doing.
That was blatantly obvious the next day when I went to see the Hopewell Care Center. I walked in, dressed in a black suit with my hair up, list of questions on a legal pad in hand so they would know I wasn’t the type to be hoodwinked by appearances and promises. I had to pass through a large entry area to get to the office, which I did with an observant eye, hawkish in an effort to spot anything I didn’t like.
On the left was an aquarium, which an old man was peering into, muttering under his breath and gesticulating wildly for the fish.
On the right were two women leaning on their respective walkers, white heads bent together as they talked, as if they’d just been lifted from the back fence and placed there in mid-conversation. Gossip was apparently what, in their opinion, women were born to do.
Straight ahead was a man of about thirty-five in a high-tech wheelchair whose face and body were so contorted that I had to look away to avoid staring at him.
I glanced down at my list of questions. I might as well scratch them all out and ask just one: Does my mother really belong here?
A blond woman poked her head out of a door farther down. “Are you Jill McGavock?” she called.
Only because I smelled coffee and thought she might offer me some did I say, “Yes. Are you Monique?”
Contrary to the message that her name—Monique l’Orange—suggested, Monique at least appeared to be sensible. I didn’t see any crystals dangling from the ceiling, and she did not attempt to squeeze or pat any part of my anatomy. A few sips into a cup of coffee, I was describing my mother’s behavior to her and asking her point blank: “Is this the place for her?”
“Let me show you something,” she said.
What she led me to was a separate section of Hopewell, where no one was confined to a wheelchair or wandering aimlessly. This, Monique told me, was the assisted-living section, as opposed to the nursing home area I’d entered through.
The rooms had a relatively homey look. In the recreational area ping-pong matches, card games, and communal TV watching were going on simultaneously. The crowd around the television was actually watching Moonstruck and nodding appreciatively every time Olympia Dukakis came on the screen.
“We don’t park them there for the day,” Monique told me. “We limit their TV watching and try to divert them into more stimulating activities.”
I found myself wondering if my mother could actually be stimulated by a rousing hand of canasta. As we continued on toward the dining room, I said to Monique, “I’ve described my mother’s condition to you, and I think I’ve made it clear that she’s deteriorating rapidly.”
“You have.”
“So, do you think she can handle this atmosphere? I mean, these people all seem to be in their right minds—relative to her, anyway.”
Monique stopped in the doorway to the dining area. “I know what you’re saying, but I think when you see your mother with other people whose behaviors are similar to hers, she won’t seem so strange to you.”
I scanned the dining room. It was a cozy collection of tables, each one set with cloth tablecloth and napkins and a Christmas centerpiece.
“Wow,” I said. “Did Thanksgiving already happen? I was only half kidding about that.”
Monique smiled. “You’re about to get your life back,” she said.
I grasped at that like it was the last rope hanging. “When can you get her in?”
There was the rub. They had a room available in assisted living, but the paperwork was going to take at least five working days.
“It isn’t like checking into a hospital or a hotel,” Monique said. “You are basically turning all responsibility for your mother’s care over to us.”
“Five days?” I said. “I can handle that.”
How, though, I hadn’t a clue.
That day and Sunday were fine. Max and I took turns keeping what felt like surveillance, and Mother was cooperative except on Sunday afternoon when Burl came over to drain the koi pond and transfer Mother’s fish to a neighbor’s pond three doors down.
“You could sell these and get a good price for them,” Burl told me as he cornered one with his net behind a rock.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “I thought they were just overgrown goldfish.”
Burl shook his head and nodded toward the house. “She knows what I’m doing, too, and she doesn’t like it. She’s fixin’ to have a hissy fit.”
I looked at the house. My mother was indeed standing at the guest room window, overseeing the whole operation. Even as I watched, she brought up a hand and tapped sharply on the glass.
Burl turned toward the house. “I know, Doc,” he said. “But you’re gonna be movin’ on and there won’t be anybody here to take care of them the way you did. I got it covered—trust me.”
Was it sheer coincidence, I wondered, that she then moved away from the window?
The next five days presented another set of problems, but I got them somewhat worked out. Burl, of all people, agreed to stay with Mother while I was teaching class. I tried to convince Nigel to let me do office hours at night, but he was concerned about my safety and suggested instead that I forget them for the week and just give my students an e-mail address and a phone number where I could be reached at certain times. He assured me he would handle it all with Dr. Ferguson.
My students took the news about my office hours with only mild interest. Except for Tabitha. She got a panicked look on her face, which remained there through the entire class.
I actually felt sorry for her. When she approached me after class, I said, “Look, I’ll draw you a map. You can come over to my mother’s place for your tutoring session.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just don’t wear the skates, okay?”
With all of that in place it was, to say the least, an interesting week.
Burl arrived Monday, Wednesday, and Friday precisely at 10:30 A.M. wearing his tool belt as if he hadn’t been to bed yet. While I was gone,
he trimmed the oleanders, fixed a couple of shutters that were threatening to separate themselves from the house, and unclogged the downstairs toilet.
“I didn’t even know it was stopped up,” I said when he told me.
“It wasn’t till she tried to flush a pair of pantyhose down it.” He gave a soft grunt. “That’s one place I don’t follow her.”
Max came over every evening to watch Mother so I could run with Sam on the Loop and then get some work done. Every night Max cooked a dinner more elaborate than the one before it. I guessed that was to assuage his guilt, but I didn’t mention it. I hadn’t eaten that well, that consistently, in years.
Even though I didn’t normally tutor Tabitha on a daily basis, she came every afternoon that week. The first day, I was lucky enough to get Mother down for a nap before she arrived, and then I whisked Tabitha into the study so fast that she didn’t have a chance to ask where my “ill” parent was. We almost got through the entire session before I heard Mother get up and start rattling things around in the kitchen.
“Try number eleven,” I said to Tabitha, and then I hurried in after her.
Mother was opening and closing cabinet doors and growing suffer by the minute.
“What are you looking for?” I said. “Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“Okay, what do you usually eat for a snack?” I opened the refrigerator and peered in. “You want some…leftover mortadella?”
I pulled my head out of the refrigerator and looked around. She was gone.
With visions of her diving into the now-empty koi pond dancing in my head, I broke for the hall. From the study, I heard Tabitha’s husky voice bubbling out a “Hi!”
This was going to be a trip.
I got to the study just in time to see my mother dipping her hand into the bag of Doritos Tabitha was holding. “Mother, no!” I said.
“Oh, it’s okay She can have some,” Tabitha said. She wrinkled her freckled nose at Mother. “Aren’t they good? Sour cream ranch—they’re totally my favorite.”
I had never known them to be “totally my mother’s favorite,” but she was chowing down on them as if she’d been craving them all day. As far as I knew, she had never put a morsel of junk food into her mouth until that moment.
“I’m sorry, Tabitha,” I said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Tabitha gave me a blank look and then looked back at Mother. “Well, she’s not bothering me. Can she just sit here while we work? Or do you need me to go? I can go—”
I looked at my mother, too. She popped another chip into her mouth and then giggled at Tabitha.
“She’s sweet,” Tabitha said. “Can’t she stay?”
“She’ll probably only sit there for about two minutes,” I said. “She doesn’t stay put for long.”
But Mother remained, calmly polishing off the rest of Tabitha’s chips while I explained second-order equations. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she did it just to make a liar out of me. When we finished, Tabitha picked up one of Mother’s hands and pressed it between hers.
“It was nice to meet you,” she said. “I know you’ve been sick, and I’m praying for you. God’s with you, you know.”
I watched my mother closely. If anything was going to stir her up, it was going to be a comment like that.
But Mother just watched Tabitha with that same flat expression she’d worn while I was rattling on about differential calculus. It didn’t matter what we said. She was there for the Doritos.
It may have been my most profoundly disturbing thought yet.
That was all Sam and I talked about up on the Loop that week. It was no longer a question of whether my mother still had a soul. It was now a matter of my proving that she had one. Otherwise, she was on a par with one of the koi we had just transferred from one pond to another so somebody would take care of it.
“So, the Wager is working,” Sam said to me late Friday afternoon. We’d slipped off the beaten path again and were perched on what Sam insisted on calling the Jill Tree.
“What do you mean it’s working?” I said. “I don’t see it working. In the first place, I don’t even know how to act as if there’s a God.”
“You’re doing it.”
“How am I doing it?”
“You’ve turned your whole life upside down this week for your mother.”
“Like I had a choice.”
“You did. You could have hired a temporary caretaker.”
“I couldn’t face another Freda.”
“Could you have a year ago? Six months ago? Even six weeks ago?
“But what real difference is it making? Mother doesn’t care who’s there with her, as long as we feed her and keep her from flushing lingerie down the john. And you still can’t answer this question: If there’s a God, how could there possibly be this—this injustice—this brilliant woman reduced to a zombie stealing a kid’s Doritos?”
Sam inched forward on the horizontal trunk. “Let’s clarify,” he said. “If we say that there is injustice, we can only be sure of that if we know that there is justice itself. Correct?”
“What do you mean? Like we can’t know if we’re unhappy unless we know what happy is?”
He grinned. “You should be going for a doctorate in philosophy. Forget all that math nonsense.”
“Move on, Blaze,” I said.
“All right, if there is injustice, then it must be that there is true justice for it to be a defect of.”
I traced that knot mentally and nodded.
“Now, does true justice exist?”
“Theoretically.”
“But in reality? In practice?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“And I’m sure most people would agree with you. Ergo, if there has to be true justice—”
“Did you just say ergo? Tell me you didn’t actually use the word ergo.”
“Yes, I did. Now stop breaking my train of thought. If there has to be true justice, and this true justice is not found on earth or in man—” his eyes glowed—“it must exist in heaven and in God.”
“You can’t just take everything and turn it into God,” I said.
“Sure I can,” he said, “because God’s already in it.”
I didn’t answer right away I had a half-dozen sarcastic retorts just waiting to fire at him. But as I flipped through them, they merely turned over on themselves, like cards in a Rolodex file.
“You know what’s really maddening?” I said.
Sam shook his head.
“That I have to admit that if I could see just one sign that ‘God’ was making any of this better, I would want it all to be true. I would want God to exist.”
“Why is that maddening?”
“Because I hate to be wrong. I would have to admit that I’ve been wrong all this time.”
“If you don’t ever want to be wrong,” Sam said, “then you sure don’t want to be wrong about God.” His grin widened and he got closer to me, so that I could almost feel the glow in his eyes. “What kind of sign are you looking for? What is it that you want to see?
“I don’t know.”
“Then how will you know it’s a sign when you see it? Maybe you’ve already had signs and you didn’t recognize them.”
“Do you seriously think that?” I said.
“Look, Jill,” he said. “I can’t talk you into God. Matter of fact, I can’t talk you into anything. Nobody can.”
“At least you know that much,” I said, grinning.
“I know this, too: If you don’t want to believe in God, you won’t. But you want to—you said it yourself.”
“I might want to,” I said. “But wanting isn’t getting. I’m thirty years old, Blaze—I’ve figured that out.”
“And I’m thirty-five, and I’ve figured out two things.” He raised a finger. “Only those who seek God find Him.” He raised another one. “And all those who seek God find Him. Since the signs of God can only b
e seen by those who seek Him, He stays partially hidden.”
“You’re making this up as you go along!” I said, laughing.
But his face was sober. Only his eyes still danced.
“God doesn’t want the seeing-is-believing approach,” he said.
I could feel my face growing sober, too—and something like anger brewing in my heart.
“Then what the heck does He want?” I said. “I’ve just about given up everything that was important to me. I’m down to begging for answers—and for me that is rock bottom. I’m sick of these intellectual arguments and these faith experiments that tear me apart! What does He want me to do?”
Sam took me firmly by both shoulders. I was crying. I was yelling loud enough for Deputy Dog to hear me. I was practically tearing my hair out by the roots. And I wasn’t caring that I was doing any of it in front of him.
“You tell me what it is He wants me to do!” I cried again.
Sam put his arms around me and held me tight, so that no amount of fighting could push him away.
“He wants you to do what you’re doing right now,” he said into my hair. “He wants you to let Him have it. He wants you to let Him have it all.”
SEVENTEEN
Sam followed me home from the Loop in his car, just to make sure I was all right, he said. That was despite my protests that I had only lost it for a few minutes and I was fine now. We both knew I was lying.
He walked me to the door and stood looking down at me, hands lazily parked in his pockets.
“You going to be all right tomorrow?” he said. “If tonight is any indication, probably not.”
“So go ahead and cry through the whole ordeal. I’m sure they’ve seen family members do that before.”
“No one but you has ever seen me do that or ever will,” I said. “You tell anybody and I’ll cut your heart out.”
He didn’t respond. In fact, he looked rather shyly at the toe of his running shoe, which he was using to guide a beetle away from the doormat. When he looked up at me, his smile was soft.
“Too late,” he said. “I think you’ve already cut my heart out.” Then he took my face in both hands and kissed me, and I didn’t push him away. I kissed him back until I could no longer breathe.