Pascal's Wager

by Nancy Rue

  “I’ll be praying for you tomorrow,” he said.

  I stayed on the front porch long after he was gone, mentally turning myself inside out trying to deny the potential for passion. I lost.

  I took Mother to Hopewell the next morning. Burl followed in his pickup truck with suitcases, a box of decor I’d selected for her room, and the armchair from the guest room that she sat in at the window. Max had stood waving from the doorway, giving every indication that his heart was breaking in half.

  I, on the other hand, was the picture of control. It was the first time I’d had Mother out of the yard since her last appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, and she’d definitely declined since then. My main focus was to keep her from stealing some poor unsuspecting resident’s breakfast.

  The focus shifted slightly when we pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the ignition.

  “Okay,” I said, “here we are.”

  She sat staring out the side window while I rooted around behind the seat for my purse.

  “I’ll come around to that side and let you out—” I started to say. But I stopped.

  Mother was pointing her index finger toward the building.

  “What?” I said.

  She turned to me, and it was all I could do not to gasp. Her flat expression had pulled together into one of pure bewilderment. For the flash of a second, her eyes were once again their intense blue, and they were demanding answers.

  “This is the Hopewell Care Center,” I said. I could hear my voice growing louder, my pace slowing, as if I were talking to someone who didn’t speak English. “Look, Mother, you’re going to be staying here now. It’s a great place, and they’re really going to—”

  To what? Keep you from jumping out the window? From taking a dive into the nearest fishbowl?

  She was still watching me, her square jaw set expectantly. A familiar sense of tension seeped into me, and I scrambled for better vocabulary, more intelligent phrases.

  “It’s about your quality of life,” I said. “Basically, you don’t have any at home. This is going to be your home now. Trust me. I’ve analyzed this by every method known to man and then some.”

  I felt as if I were talking to the old Liz McGavock, the one who watched my words as well as heard them, and then pounced on them like a lioness.

  But she turned slowly to look at the building again, and one hand jerked up and pointed vaguely in its direction.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the place.”

  When she turned back to me, her face was expressionless once again, her eyes almost inanimate. But from then until we stepped inside the building, she never took them off me, and even then they darted back to me occasionally, somehow questioning even in their lifelessness.

  The entrance hall was more crowded as we walked in than it had been the Saturday before. There were several patients at the aquarium, and, remembering the koi pond incident, I hurried Mother past it to the office. Monique was waiting for us and led us briskly to the assisted residents’ wing, where I said to Mother, “This is where you’ll be—not back there.”

  Mother was asleep on the bed about thirty seconds after Monique showed us to her room. I was almost finished putting her things away when Burl came in with the chair. I’d forgotten he was even with us. He didn’t seem to mind. He appeared to be quite comfortable as he positioned the chair facing the window and then checked the lock and screen, probably to make sure Mother couldn’t pull one of her Houdini acts in the middle of the night.

  “Nice place,” he said to me.

  “I thought so,” I said. And then suddenly that sounded imperious to me, as if Burl were some underling and I was chiding him for being so impertinent as to validate my choice. I turned to him. “You think she’ll be all right here, don’t you? I mean, don’t you think her quality of life was suffering at home?”

  Burl folded his hands behind his back. His face was its usual deadpan, but his eyes seemed almost annoyed.

  “What does that mean exactly—‘quality of life’?” he said.

  “Well. I see it as how much enjoyment she’s getting out of being alive. It can’t be that pleasant, sitting in a chair staring out the window all day. To me, that’s why she gets up all of a sudden and goes running around? She’s probably looking for something to do. Here they have things for her to do that are appropriate to her condition.”

  Burl gave a soft grunt. “I hear about quality of life all the time at the hospital.”

  “I guess you would.”

  “They use it like it means how much sex and money you have.”

  “Excuse me?” I could feel my eyebrows twisting.

  “Seems like if you can’t use your money and your power or can’t bed somebody down once in a while, you haven’t got a life.”

  Aside from the fact that it was the most I’d heard Burl speak at one time, I was intrigued.

  “Your mother,” he went on, “she never talked about quality of life.”

  “You talked about this often?” I said. I hoped I didn’t sound skeptical, because I didn’t feel that way. It was beginning to dawn on me that people read me the way I had always read my mother, and I wasn’t too crazy about the idea.

  “Most every evening we took a coffee break together if she was still there and she wasn’t too busy,” Burl said. “She never said anything like ‘they ought to just take this person off life support because he doesn’t have any quality of life left.’” He shifted his eyes over to Mother, who was snoring softly on the bed. “She thinks every life is worth saving, so I guess that means she thinks suffering has quality. If it doesn’t, then what’s her whole life been about up to now?”

  I knew I was staring at him, but I didn’t attempt to stop. If I had, I would have missed his look, which covered my mother like a warm blanket as she slept. He didn’t shake his head as if to say, “What a shame. What a waste.” He gazed at her out of a face etched with wisdom. I realized then that he knew her the way I didn’t, the way no one did—maybe not even Max. It made me feel small and cold.

  She woke up shortly thereafter and went straight to the chair, sat down, and looked out the window.

  “I think you’re gonna like it here, Doc,” Burl said. He smiled at her, and the web of lines on his face came to life. “I’ve got to go now, but I’ll be back. You want anything?”

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  “If you think of anything, you just tell your daughter. I’ll be seein’ her. There’s a couple things I still need to take care of around your house.”

  “Thank you,” I said to him as he started in his deliberate way for the door. “That seems so inadequate. You’ve done so much.”

  “I’m not done,” he said. And then he left.

  With Burl gone, I was suddenly at a loss for what to do or say. Mother was contentedly studying the view outside her window. Everything had been organized, tidied, and straightened, and I was growing uncomfortable in the silence and awkwardness of the moment. When Monique walked in the door, I could have kissed her feet.

  “If you want to leave now,” she said to me, “I think that would be fine. You’re doing all right for the moment, aren’t you, Dr. McGavock?”

  Mother didn’t answer.

  “I think you can take that as a yes,” I said.

  Monique stepped out into the hall. I crouched beside my mother’s chair, and she moved her eyes lifelessly toward me. I didn’t want to leave her here, and yet there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of this place—and take her with me, or not take her with me. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted everything to go back to the way it was before this…this…thing had wrecked our lives. Before I’d ever gotten lumps in my throat or wrestled with indecision or felt the burn of shame for my own coldness.

  “I have to go,” I said. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. By then, you’ll be running this place. Just cut them a little slack the first day, okay?”

  She blinked and then turned again t
o look out the window. I grabbed my purse and stood up.

  “See you tomorrow?” I said. “I’ll try not to interrupt your bridge game.”

  Somehow I made it out the door and several steps down the hall. Monique was standing at the corner, and she smiled and pointed behind me.

  “Someone’s following you,” she said.

  I turned around. Mother was coming toward me at a brisk clip, looking for all the world as if she were rushing a lab report to Ted Lyons.

  “What is it?” I said to her.

  She stopped beside me and with a jerk pointed her finger on down the hall.

  “Yeah, I’m leaving,” I said. I looked helplessly at Monique. She just nodded. What that was supposed to tell me, I hadn’t a clue. “Like I told you,” I said to Mother, “you’re staying here. It’s the best thing.”

  She didn’t appear puzzled. She merely stood there, looking down the hall, pointing at some nebulous destination with a jerky finger.

  “You know what, Dr. McGavock?” Monique said finally—a good two minutes after she should have intervened, in my opinion. “I have a lot to show you. Why don’t we get started right now and let Jill go take care of business?”

  At least, I think that’s what she said. I said good-bye to my mother one more time and then moved away at a near gallop. All I could hear were my own words, spoken as if I knew for a fact that they were true. It’s the best thing, I had told her. It’s the best thing.

  But I no more knew that leaving her there to stand like a mannequin with a ping-pong paddle in her hand was the best thing than I knew whether I was going to make it out the front door without throwing up into the nearest trash can.

  I thought about it until I could no longer stand the sound of it in my head. It’s the best thing. Then I got into the Miata and punched in a number on my cell phone.

  “Blaze?” I said when Sam answered. “I need to see you.”

  We met at Denny’s just down the street from Hopewell, Sam looking sleepy-eyed and boyish with his curly hair unbrushed and a red Stanford T-shirt thrown over a pair of chinos. But his mind was obviously wide awake as he ordered us coffee and then leaned intently toward me.

  “It didn’t go well?” he said.

  I filled him in.

  “Okay, Blaze,” I said when I was through. “Where does God fit into that?”

  He waited for the waitress to drop off our coffee. Then he sipped his thoughtfully while I dumped three packets of Sweet ’n Low into mine and stirred like I was trying to dissolve sand.

  “I think we need to get clearer on what you can expect from God,” Sam said. He nodded at my coffee mug. “You’re going to get carpal tunnel.”

  I looked sheepishly at my hand and put the spoon on the table. “Okay, let’s have it.”

  “If you’re looking for a God who authors mathematical truths and the order of the elements and that’s it, go read Epicurus.”

  “Nah. I’ve got the mathematical truths handled.”

  “If you want a God who grants the wishes of the people who worship him with great wealth and happy days, talk to the people who see God as some kind of Fairy Godfather.”

  I gave a half-laugh. “That doesn’t sounds so bad. Sign me up for that.”

  “I can sign you up, but it isn’t going to happen. That isn’t God.”

  I stared miserably into my coffee. “Then you better tell me what God is, Blaze,” I said. “At this point, I’m open to anything.”

  Sam pushed his own coffee aside so he could lean farther across the table. “You mind if we go back to Pascal?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, picture old Blaise sitting in his apartment brooding over the fact that his belief in God was merely intellectual. That kept him in a quandary as to how to satisfy the demands of both God and the world as a man of his station in life was expected to do.” Sam grinned. “There were certain ‘moral compromises’ the men of his class allowed themselves to make. Anyway, suddenly he experiences God—for about two hours.”

  “Experiences how?”

  “He had a vision.”

  “A vision,” I said. “Okay.”

  “He called it ‘the night of fire.’ God apparently came to him in flames and told him what eternal life is: that he should know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent. Pascal came out of that encounter a completely changed man—how did he put it? In ‘total submission to Jesus Christ. Eternally in bliss for a day of hard training in this world.’” Sam looked at me, his eyes glowing as if he had just seen a vision himself. “My favorite part of the story is that nobody even knew about the vision until nine years later when he died. His servant was going through his clothes and he noticed what appeared to be extra padding sewn into his doublet. Turns out it was a piece of parchment and wrapped inside it was a sheet of paper where Blaise had written an account of his night of fire. He evidently carried it around with him in his jacket everywhere he went.”

  “So that’s where you get all these little Pascal zingers you’re always firing at me?” I said.

  “No, those were found on who knows how many little pieces of paper all over his rooms. It looked like he was going to compile them in a book but never got around to it. Other people have done that since then—the collection is called the Pensées. That’s French for ‘thoughts.’”

  “So there’s a book?” I said.

  “You want to read it?” Sam said. “I have about ten copies in different translations.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said. I smiled at him, and I could feel myself sinking warmly into the seat. “So, Blaze, are you expecting me to have a vision?”

  “I’m not saying you won’t,” Sam said. “But I never have, at least not to that extent. The point is, the God of the Christians—the God Pascal saw and hundreds of thousands, millions of people have seen—is a God who fills the whole being of the people who love Him. He makes us aware, deeply aware, that we’re unworthy—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we lick the earth.”

  “—and simultaneously, that He’s merciful to us. He unites us with Himself in the depths of our souls so that we’re humble and joyful and confident and love-filled because intertwined with Him, we’re incapable of being anything else no matter what kind of suffering life slaps us with. That is the message Jesus came to deliver.”

  “Should I be happy because I just put my mother in a nursing home?” I spread my hand on the table. “I’m not being sarcastic. I really want to know.”

  “Not superficially happy—like Susie Cheerleader,” Sam said. “But at peace here.” He rubbed his fist against his chest.

  “But I’m not at peace about it,” I said. “I already hate it that she’s in that place, because even though they call it assisted living, sooner or later she’s going to be in that hallway, staring at the tropical fish.” I cupped my hands around the coffee mug. “But what am I supposed to do? I can’t keep her at home, not unless I completely dump everything I’ve been working for. Is that going to give me peace?”

  “Look into the vision and ask God that,” Sam said.

  I looked at him blankly. “What vision?”

  “Whatever vision of God you have.”

  “Do I have one?”

  “For now, it’s however you perceive God. Get that in your mind and then just ask: ‘What’s this about? What am I supposed to do?’”

  “You want me to pray.”

  “Essentially. I want you to talk to God—whatever that means to you. That’s acting as if. Act as if God’s actually there. Don’t wait for some magic hand to come down from above and move you around like a pawn. God doesn’t play chess. God wants a relationship with you.”

  I fingered the rim of the coffee cup. “I don’t know, Blaze. I don’t know if God is ready for me.”

  Sam reached across the table and ran a finger along my cheek. “Jill, God’s been waiting for you for a long time. I think I have some sense of what He feels.”

  He sat back and roamed the room with hi
s eyes. I had to rub my hands on the front of my skirt because they were breaking out into a sweat.

  “You are the most compelling woman I’ve ever known,” he said finally.

  I tried to laugh. “Compelling? Now there’s one I haven’t heard before.”

  “One what? You think that’s a line?”

  His eyes begged me to say no. There was a sincerity there I couldn’t hurl another shard of sarcasm at. I shook my head. “No, I believe you think that,” I said.

  “I don’t just believe it—I know it.” He grinned at me. “I don’t understand it, but I know it.”

  Our smiles came together, clinking like glasses in a toast, and with it, the clear lines in my head wilted and bent and wrapped themselves around each other. All my neatly ordered compartments blurred into mushy masses. Walls caved in like melting snowbanks. There was nothing to separate me from the warm ache of looking at Sam Bakalis.

  I let myself look.

  EIGHTEEN

  After we left Denny’s that Saturday, I was no longer trying to nurture any denial about my feelings for Sam. I couldn’t, because they were turning me into someone I didn’t recognize.

  But except for a brief chat with him on my cell phone when I was on my way to Hopewell Sunday afternoon, there was a sudden and complete silence on Sam’s end. I didn’t think about it much on Monday when I called him and he didn’t answer at home or at his office. I did begin to wonder that afternoon when I called again and hadn’t heard from him by two o’clock, when I knew he would be out of class.

  I was leaving a message with the philosophy department secretary as Tabitha arrived at Mother’s for her tutoring session. I’d forgotten to tell her we could resume meeting at the office now, and it had been working out so well at the house anyway.

  “You okay?” Tabitha said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

  “I wasn’t, like, eavesdropping or anything, but I kinda heard you say Dr. Bakalis’s name. I didn’t know you knew Dr. B. Don’t you just love him?”

  I was glad I had my back to her as I hung up her coat. “You obviously know him.”