by Nancy Rue
“He’s the advisor for our campus Christian group,” she said. “Do you think he’s cute?”
“Cute?” I was nearly choking. “I suppose you could call him attractive.”
Tabitha giggled. “I think he’s adorable. He’s the kind of man I want to marry.”
I turned to look at her and hoped my mouth wasn’t falling open too far.
“So have you proposed?” I said.
Tabitha shrieked. “No! He’s a little old for me.” Her face was now red enough that I could no longer see her freckles. “But I hope when I’m ready to get married, I’ll meet a guy my age like him. He actually told us in one of our small-group discussions that he will never marry a woman who isn’t a Christian because he wants a marriage built on a solid foundation of God. Well, I can’t put it exactly like he did, but it was something like that.”
I was nodding, but I was clearly hearing Hercules saying, Sammy wants a church lady. It settled in my brain the way pancakes lay heavy in your stomach.
While she was getting herself organized at the coffee table in the living room where I currently had everything I owned strewn around, I said, “I assume you’re going home for the holidays. Right?”
“Yeah, I leave in seven more days! I don’t have it down to hours yet—I’ll probably start that tomorrow.”
“If you can calculate that, you can do calculus,” I said. “Personally, I think you just have a mental block. You don’t realize you’re probably one of the brightest people in that class.”
“Nuh-uh,” she said, wide-eyed. “I just feel so dumb in there. All those boys who rattle off stuff just like that.”
“They need to get lives,” I said.
Tabitha giggled. I wanted to look in a mirror to make sure I hadn’t switched identities. Had I just said that—that people needed to have something in their lives besides their academic pursuits? It was slightly scary.
We finally got settled, Tabitha with her usual bag of Doritos. We were only about halfway through the second problem when she looked around and said, “It doesn’t feel the same without your mom here with us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t have anybody competing for your chips.”
“I liked to share with her,” Tabitha said. “Made me feel like there was something I could do for her. Is she happy where she is now?”
“Who knows?” I said.
Tabitha nodded. Then her eyes went to the piano. “That’s so gorgeous,” she said. “I bet it has an incredible sound.”
“Oh, I forgot you told me you played,” I said. “Try it out.”
Her eyes bulged. “Are you sure? I mean, it’s a baby grand.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s got eighty-eight keys, just like the rest of them. Go ahead. Play something.”
I sat back on the couch and watched her approach the instrument as if she’d been summoned to the royal throne. Any second I expected her to prostrate herself at its pedals. She reverently lifted the cover from the keyboard and sat on the bench. When she started to play, I watched her, spellbound.
All at once, the living room was alive with scarlet sounds, and Tabitha herself was no longer the gawky freshman. Everything about her became charged with the vibrant electricity of a young woman embraced by the music. She eased a brilliance from the piano that I certainly had never achieved and had seen few other people do.
I hardly realized it when she stopped, until she shrugged and rocked her head side-to-side and giggled for no apparent reason. I watched the lanky, insecure kid return.
“All right, so tell me something,” I said. “Why in the heck are you wasting your time on math? Tabitha, that was amazing. Do you have any idea what kind of talent you have?”
“It’s all God,” she said.
“But does God want you to waste it while you try to turn yourself into some math geek?”
She cocked her head at me. “You’re not a math geek.”
“Yes, I am. I was born to be a math geek. You were not.”
She looked a little alarmed. “Do you mean you think I won’t make it as a math major?”
“You’ll get by. But you don’t have a passion for it—not the kind of passion you have for playing Rachmaninoff.”
“But that’s just because I’ve taken lessons for so long. Calculus is all new to me.”
I grunted. “No, I took lessons for ten years. My mother had to threaten me with house arrest to get me to practice. Today I could probably play you a nice version of ‘Chopsticks.’ I didn’t love it the way you obviously do. I love math. You need to pursue what you have a passion for.”
Tabitha left the piano bench and sat on the other end of the couch from me. She twisted her hair with her finger. “I told you before: My parents don’t think music is what God wants me to do with my life.”
“What is up with letting your parents decide the course of life for you?” I said. “I didn’t let my mother dictate that to me—and believe me, she could dictate in her day. She’d give Mussolini a run for his money. She thought I was going to toddle along right behind her and go into medicine, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being compared to her, so I chose math.”
Tabitha was nodding, leaning forward, studying my face with genuine interest. I’d never noticed that she listened like that—with more poise than when she talked herself.
“No offense or anything,” she said, “but in a way you sort of, like, did let your mother determine what you were going to do with your life. I mean, you know, by rebelling against it.”
I considered that. “In a twisted kind of way, I guess you’re right.”
“Not that that’s bad,” she said quickly. “You’re the best math teacher I ever had. I think even though you did go into math because you were rebelling against your mom, it’s still where God wants you to be.”
“That’s just a lucky coincidence, then,” I said, “because I definitely didn’t discuss it with God.”
Tabitha stopped twirling her hair, and her eyes got wide. She was obviously having a “wow” moment.
“I just realized,” she said, voice breathlessly husky. “I didn’t really discuss it with God either. I mean, I talked to my parents about it and I kept praying, ‘God, please let me follow their guidance,’ but I never actually asked Him myself.” She cocked her head at me. “How old were you when you stopped asking your mom about everything and started deciding for yourself?”
“I don’t think I ever did stop,” I said. “She just stopped answering.”
“When was that?” Tabitha said.
I sighed. “About two months ago.”
Tabitha giggled uncertainly, but I wasn’t trying to be funny. I’d had my own sudden realization: two months ago my mother had ceased to be someone I fought hard against emulating and as a result had became identical to. When she had ceased to respond and give me a net I could bounce back from like an acrobat, my entire identity had been called into question. No wonder my life had been one big question ever since.
“So how do you determine the right path to take?” Tabitha said. “How would I know where God is leading me?”
I squirmed inwardly. With all of my own struggles and questions, where did I get off giving this child—this trusting, talented, good-hearted young woman—advice about anything?
But she was waiting for a response.
“This is what a friend of mine told me,” I said finally. “Imagine in your mind what God is—how you perceive Him—and then talk to that. Ask the questions you’ve been asking me.”
How exactly she was supposed to hear the answers that were allegedly going to come, I couldn’t tell her. She seemed to know that, or at least, she didn’t ask me. She simply beamed and then lunged across the space between us and hugged me.
“All right, look,” I said, “why don’t we rearrange your tutoring schedule so you can come here, instead of my office at Sloan, later in the afternoons. That way when we’re through, you can play the piano.”
�
��You’re going to keep living here, then?” she said.
“Yeah. I don’t know why—I’m just not ready to leave yet.”
“This is great!” Tabitha practically squealed. “I love this!” And then she clapped—she actually clapped.
As I reached for Tabitha’s calculus book, I thought, I can’t remember the last time I was so spontaneously happy that I burst into applause. In fact, maybe I never had been.
The staff at Hopewell told me that I didn’t have to visit Mother every day, and that my frequent visits might actually be keeping her from adjusting as quickly as she might. I followed that advice, but unfortunately, that gave me a little too much time to think—about how far behind I was in my work, about how empty the house seemed now even though Max still joined me for dinner most evenings, about how uneasy I’d become because Sam still hadn’t called.
I didn’t try calling him again. He obviously wasn’t eager to talk to me or he’d have responded to the half-dozen messages I’d left on his home answering machine. By Friday afternoon, I was beating myself up for leaving even one. I must be coming across as pretty desperate and pathetic.
As hard as I tried—and I definitely tried, burying myself in K-theory computations—I couldn’t help looking for a reason for Sam’s abrupt silence.
That evening, I couldn’t stand cross-examining myself any longer. I toyed with the idea of going over to Antonio’s and seeing who was winning at darts, but what if I ran into Sam there—otherwise occupied? I grabbed my purse and took off for Hopewell. It was late, but even if Mother was in bed, I was sure they’d let me see her. Why I wanted to, I couldn’t have said.
Only the hallway lights were on when I arrived, and I padded softly toward Mother’s room, listening to the mutterings and the snoring and the deep, restless breathing that wafted out from behind the doors. I hesitated outside Mother’s room, listening as I had so many times for the sounds of her sleep. All I heard was a frightened cry.
I shoved the door open and flipped on the light. The sides of her bed had been pulled up, and her hands were tied to them.
Several obscenities spewed out of my mouth as I literally threw my purse into a corner and began furiously untying the restraints.
“What the heck is this about?” I said. “Who did this?”
My mother was trembling, and her eyes clung to me, terrified. The minute I released her second hand, she tried to climb over the side railings. She did, in fact, get both arms over and threw them around my neck. She hung there, whimpering softly into my ear.
I put my own arms gingerly around her. Hugging my mother wasn’t a thing that came naturally to me. But this wasn’t my mother. This was a frightened child who’d been tied to a bed.
“Is there a problem?” someone said from the doorway.
“You better believe there’s a problem!” I said.
But as I hurled those words over my shoulder at a woman with frosted hair and clipboard in hand, I could feel Mother’s arms clenching me tighter and her heart pounding against my chest.
“Let me get her settled down,” I said.
“I’ll help—”
“No, it looks like you’ve all helped enough. Go—just leave me alone with her!”
The woman marched out, the intent to bring in backup etched on her face. I held my mother until she stopped shaking and peeled her arms from around my neck.
“Are you okay?” I said. “Are you hurt?”
She said nothing, so I examined her wrists myself. The restraints had been soft and obviously not fastened tightly, because there wasn’t a mark on her. That made zero difference to me. The damage I imagined had been inflicted on her psyche was enough to send me into a rage. I was still raging—and only because Mother was calming down did I not pick her up and haul her out of there entirely.
Instead I carried her to her chair and wrapped a blanket around her. She leaned back and pointed a jerky finger at the window. I raised the blinds, and she gave a contented sigh and stared out into the dark. I crouched beside her.
“I’m going down to the nurses’ station,” I told her, “to find out what’s going on here. You’ll be okay?”
She didn’t look at me, but I was sure she nodded.
I took off out the door and met Nurse Frosty Hair and a battalion of others halfway down the hall. I took them all on en masse.
“Why was my mother tied up?” I demanded, eyes raking them over one by one.
“She wasn’t ‘tied up,’” Frosty said. “We put her in restraints.”
“I don’t care what you call it. Why did you do it? I didn’t sign anything giving you the authority to do that. There was nothing about this in the paperwork.”
“You didn’t read the fine print,” one woman muttered, but Frosty silenced her with a hand.
“We don’t usually have to restrain patients in the assisted-living area,” she said, gently, as if she were talking to a child. “But it’s the only way we can keep her in bed. She seems to be asleep and then the next thing you know, she’s wandering the halls.”
A short guy with a ponytail and a wrestler’s build stepped up beside her, apparently to take care of her light work.
“Other patients were complaining,” he said. “She was going into their rooms and standing over them while they were in bed. Couple of people said they woke up and found her poking at their stomachs.” He shook his head, ponytail wobbling. “We can’t have that.”
“And I can’t have you tying her down like she’s Charles Manson! She was terrified when I found her.”
“You don’t think the other patients were terrified when they opened their eyes and found her hovering over them?” Ponytail said.
“Why didn’t you just lock her door? Or, better yet, why didn’t you call me?”
“We don’t call family members for every little thing.”
“This is not ‘every little thing’!” I said. “We will find another solution to this, or I’ll take her out of here.”
“Okay, okay—” Frosty said, her hand on Ponytail’s arm, which was pumping up like a bicycle tire. “We’ll try locking her door and see if that works.”
“No more tying her down,” I said. “Absolutely none. If there’s any problem, you call me—any time, day or night. My cell phone number is on file.”
I waited until every head finally nodded, however grudgingly, and they had all backed off toward the nurses’ station. I saw more than heard the mutterings under the breath, the comments to each other. I couldn’t have cared less if they’d been a flock of indignant pigeons. I went back to Mother’s room. She was still in her chair.
“All right, this is the deal,” I said, crouching once more beside her. “You can get out of bed, sit in your chair, look out the window—but you have to stay in this room at night. They’re going to lock it, so don’t even try the knob. I promise you this: They will never tie you to the bed again, all right? Are we clear?”
She just looked at me, and then suddenly bolted for the bed and crawled under the covers. I sank down into the chair beside it.
“You want me to talk until you fall asleep?” I said.
She closed her eyes, and I put my head on my arms on the side of the bed. My heart had stopped racing like a freight train, but my mind was still going, thoughts careening off their tracks and colliding with every turn. I wanted Sam there.
“You’re not going to believe this, Mother,” I said, “but I met this guy. In fact, I met him at your anniversary dinner. He’s a Ph.D. in philosophy—teaches at Stanford. We were seeing each other—well, sort of—and then, of course, he disappeared. You always said that about men, though, didn’t you? You always told me to concentrate on my career—which I did until we started talking about some pretty intense things. Now brace yourself, Mother. We’ve been talking about God.”
NINETEEN
By the time I got back to the house that night, it was after midnight. I should have been exhausted, but even after a hot bath, a glass of warm milk, and a bo
ut with a couple of articles in K-Theory, my eyes refused to close. My body refused to even sit down. All I could do was pad around the house, pointlessly opening drawers, peering into closets, picking up items and putting them back down. Each shove of a drawer and slam of a door was louder and harsher then the one before it, until I shut the piano keyboard cover so hard the Steuben vase on top dropped over and rolled onto the floor, shattering into five-hundred-dollar shards of glass on the hardwood.
“Get a grip!” I said—to myself. “Just get ahold of yourself! My God!”
The word echoed in the room like a distorted version of Tabitha’s Rachmaninoff. When it came back to me, it landed with a thud, somewhere in my chest.
“Okay, sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry that I—what do you call it?—used Your name in vain. But I’m losing it here.”
I definitely was. I was talking out loud to some invisible force I’d always denied was even there.
And yet it was somehow calming. No maniacal head-voice was screaming at me, telling me to get up and run around like a lunatic. Talking to no one had to be something of an improvement over that.
I pulled my legs up onto the bench and hugged my knees against the silence.
“Okay,” I said, “so what do You look like? Let me get some kind of shape in my mind. Work with me here.”
I closed my eyes. No, too dark in there—too many shadows. I stared up at the ceiling. The shape of God. I’d never even considered it.
So consider it now—before you lose your mind.
“All right, I’ll tell You what I think You are,” I said. “I think You’re either some kind of cruel, heartless despot with a sadistic mind—or You just know a whole lot more than the rest of us do.”
I narrowed my eyes at the ceiling. “You sit up there or out there or wherever it is You are, and You watch what’s going on here. If You’re so all-powerful, why can’t You just cure my mother’s disease? Why don’t You swoop down and wipe out all this stuff that’s been dumped on me that I can’t handle? It’s pretty obvious I can’t handle it—I just took on eight people at once tonight. I don’t know what to do, which is no wonder because I don’t know what to think to begin with. Not with all this psychic pillage and plunder going on, which I can’t deal with because I’ve never had to before. And now when I need to be clearheaded and rational, I’m turning into Tabitha Lane in a train wreck! I don’t want to imagine a God who lets that happen! I want to imagine a God who cares about what’s going on, who will come in here and untangle this miserable mess—because I can’t. That’s the kind of God I want You to be!”
