by Lois Ruby
“Okay, I got it down. I’ll get someone out there,” the cop said. “Butler County or us, one or the other. Stay where we can reach you.” Then, like it was out of a different throat, came the cheery, “Merry Christmas.”
When we reached the driveway, I had no problem opening the gate this time. As my dad drove through, it felt like a scene from a World War II movie in which the Allies storm a Nazi compound—one of those spooky old houses with attics and dungeons—and victory was in sight.
We drove up the winding road to the front door of the house. All the drapes were shut; there were no lights showing. The house looked empty, as though the family who lived there had gone away for Christmas. Not even a mangy mutt barked. Later I found out that the deserted look at the front of the house was because all the people—and there were a lot of them—were around back, in the kitchen.
We’d just about given up, when someone came to the door. A man in his fifties, sucking on a dead pipe, greeted us with typical country hospitality: “Yep?”
Dad said, “We’re looking for Miriam Pelham.”
There was just the faintest pause before he said, “She ain’t here.” That told me two things: (1) she was, and (2) as a liar, he wasn’t a member of Sword and the Spirit Church.
“Well, sir,” Dad said, trying to sound down home and not city lawyer, “whether she is or isn’t, the Butler County Sheriff’s on his way over here, and I suspect he’ll have a search warrant.”
“Who are you, anyway?” the man shoved the pipe into his pocket and picked a fleck of something off his tongue.
Then Brother James appeared out of the shadows. “God bless you brothers, come in.”
“This is pure insane,” the other man said. “Haven’t understood one thang since it commenced.”
Brother James smiled at the man and led us through the house into the kitchen.
“Adam!” Miriam jumped to her feet. I hadn’t seen her move so quickly and easily in weeks. I thought she was about to run right to me, but her two uncles flanked her, and each took an arm.
“Brothers and sisters,” Brother James said, dripping charm, “you all remember Mr. Samuel Bergen, our lawyer, and this is his boy, Adam.”
Dad said, “Listen, we can cut the formalities, because you haven’t got a minute to lose. The police are on their way, and they will take Miriam back and arrest you, Brother James, for kidnapping and all the rest of you for conspiracy to kidnap and for obstructing justice. They’ll have a whole laundry list of charges against you, but I think we can—”
“No, they won’t be filing any charges,” Brother James said, “because I am personally taking Miriam back to the hospital.”
There was a small flutter of surprise, and I saw Miriam’s face turn gray.
“Look at the child,” Brother James said. As all eyes turned to Miriam, she seemed to shrink back into her uncles. Her mother sidestepped subtly across the room to stand by her. I had the feeling no one in the room moved without Brother James’s approval. “Look at her,” he said. “Miriam, come to me.”
Miriam took a few tentative steps toward Brother James. Her mother’s arms were outstretched toward her, as if she were giving her to Brother James, whose arms were stretched out to receive her. Miriam stood in the middle of the room, facing him.
“Touch your toes, child.” She did. “Twist this way and that.” I was embarrassed for Miriam, performing as if she were a trained seal. But she could move. “You see,” Brother James continued, “the pain has left the child.”
“Praise Jesus,” some young guy said. I remembered him from my last visit to the church.
Brother James was warming up to his subject: “She’s come through the long night of her travails. She’s been tested like Job, like Jonah, like Abraham, and as God is my witness, I tell you, she’s been healed. She’s been healed, body and spirit, as surely as God healed Miriam of leprosy in the desert a thousand years before He sent His son Jesus to us. On that day in the parched desert, Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, ‘Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee.’ For seven days she suffered, just as our Miriam has suffered these many weeks, before God saw fit to lift His hand to heal her.” I saw his outstretched hands trembling. The room was charged with electricity. A cat by the fireplace arched its back, and Miriam had tears streaming down her face. I wanted to hold her face, wipe the tears away with my two thumbs.
Brother James dropped his hands and folded them across his belly. Now he spoke barely above a whisper: “So, I will take Miriam back to the hospital, and I will insist that they run all their tests on her first thing tomorrow. And I am confident, just as I know that Lord Jesus rose up after His ordeal and death on the cross, that the doctors will find no sign, no sign at all, of the disease that inflicted the child, because she is whole again. A-men. Now, let’s get going.”
Suddenly everyone was bustling around, like stagehands between acts. Mrs. Pelham came back into the room with a small suitcase, an older woman packed up a sack lunch. Someone helped Miriam into a coat that hung too loose to be her own, and they were ready to go.
The young guy said, “Brother James, y’all go out the back road, hear? It’s narrow, and it’s covered over with snow, but the Lord will guide you. Anyways, it winds down to Route Ten. That way, you don’t come eye to eye with—anybody on the main road.”
Miriam hugged all the women and Marylou Wadkins’s two children, who’d been coloring in a corner of the kitchen. The uncles stood like soldiers with their arms at their sides, following Miriam with their eyes. As for her eyes, they rested on me and said a silent good-bye, or was it a thank you? And then she was gone.
With Brother James out of the house, the whole atmosphere changed. The pipe chewer said, “I reckon you better be going, too.” He herded us toward the front door.
I was more than glad to get out of there and feel the fresh sting of cold on my face. But Dad was furious. He walked ahead of me. I saw the anger and resolve in his shoulders.
We climbed into the Jeep to wait for the cops, rubbing our arms and stinging-cold faces and blowing into our gloves for a little warmth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Told by Miriam
“Name?”
“Miriam Pelham.”
“Pel-um, Pel-um,” the hospital volunteer repeated. She was thin and twiggy. Her bony fingers flipped through cards on her Rolodex. “Pel-um. Oh!” Her face turned the color of her smock. “Just hold on.” She spun around in her swivel chair and cupped her hand over the phone.
Brother James rested his hand on my shoulder. I wondered how he could be so calm, especially when two security guards headed right for us.
“This way, please,” the taller guard said, and the other fell into formation behind Brother James. They took us to a hospital administrator, not the chief administrator, I guessed, because he’d be off for Christmas. We heard the disembodied voice of the intercom: “Dr. Gregory, please report to Mr. Finelli’s office. Dr. Gregory to Mr. Finelli’s office.”
Mr. Finelli looked very uneasy as Brother James, towering over him, shook his hand and then motioned for him to sit down behind his own desk.
“I’ve brought the child back,” Brother James said, “because I believe in the law of the land.”
“Well and good, Mr., uh, Reverend Davies, but you realize that you abducted a patient who was under court order to remain in this hospital.”
Brother James sat back in the round chair. He had a way of making every chair fit his contours. He crossed his ankle over the opposite knee, so cool, so relaxed, while my stomach turned somersaults.
“Well now, Mr. Finelli, I only took Miriam home for Christmas. Will you be with your family today for Christmas dinner? The wife, the children, the little grandchildren all around your table? Think of their faces, sir, and tell me you would have denied Miriam Pelham a Christmas with her family.”
“That’s not the point, Reverend.”
“Then I don’t know what is. No, I sure don’t.” Brother James le
aned forward, and I saw Mr. Finelli sort of pull back.
Then Dr. Gregory arrived. He fluttered around me, looking me over closely, feeling my neck and throat with two soft, cool hands. “You don’t look bad, kid.”
“She’s healed.” Brother James stood up and slid his fingers into the back pockets of his overalls. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I want you to run every test in your arsenal—the blood tests, the computer tests, all of it.” He looked upward, toward places most of us could only imagine. “And God Almighty, strike me dead in this very spot tomorrow if those tests turn up any sign of the sickness that once sorely oppressed poor Miriam Pelham.” He came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders.
It was a gesture meant to calm me, I know, but I was terrified that something, anything, would show up on the bone scan, and God would strike Brother James dead. Yet he seemed so confident. His fingers were like cloth of great woven strength that would swath me through the tests.
No charges were filed, and I was returned to my old room. But this time I was well and strong and couldn’t stay in bed. I walked every inch of the room until I was dizzy. I sat on the window seat, counting the cars in the parking lot below. I invented stories for the families going to and from the cars.
A father held two small boys by the hand, then seemed to have quite a struggle getting them buckled into their car seats. I imagined that they’d just been up to visit their mother and new baby sister, and one of the boys would have to grow out of the car seat before the baby was ready for it.
There were other stories, too: a woman sneaking a pizza in to her husband; a priest coming to give the last rites to a nun; a man hidden behind a sunburst of red and green balloons meant for a boy in Pediatrics. At the end of afternoon visiting hours, people poured out too fast for me to conjure up their stories.
The afternoon dragged on, until Dr. Chin came in, wearing a pretty orange shirtwaist dress and carrying her stool.
“Merry Christmas,” she said, her voice as tinkly as ever. “You are back. I’m so glad.” She moved a chair to the center of the room. “Sit, please.” She sat on the stool in front of me, hands on her knees. I had the sense that she was focusing deeply, for her eyes, behind those absurd huge glasses, never moved. Finally she said, “Very well. We start. Breathe very deeply, in, out, in, out. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” Her hands passed over me, like a Hovercraft looking for a landing site.
“How do I feel?” I asked, half teasingly.
“Do not talk, please. Clear, very clear.” When she’d been all over me, she sat back down on her stool. “You feel fine. No tight spots, no hot spots. Your body is harmonious. Dr. Gregory will claim the miracle, and so will your church. But you and I know what did it.”
“You mean Therapeutic Touch?”
Dr. Chin rolled her head from side to side. ‘No, no, no. Harmony. Your body is in harmony with the cosmos.”
“Do you really believe this?”
Dr. Chin shrugged and plunged her hands into her deep orange pockets. “I believe in everything that works. Tomorrow the tests will confirm my findings, and you must be very relaxed and centered and balanced for the tests. Now, rest, please.” She hustled me along to the bed and pulled from her pocket a downy white feather. “Hold this, stroke this. Brush it against your cheek. It will help to center you. Think of the bird.”
Adam came by. He poked his head in the door and asked, “Are you speaking to me?”
I was sitting in the center of the bed, thumbing through an old copy of Good Housekeeping. I pinched my cheeks to get some extra color in them and pulled my hair out from behind my ears. “You can come all the way in. I won’t throw a bedpan at you.”
Adam stood shyly beside the bed, twiddling with his car keys. How many times had we met this way, with me in or on the bed and him beside it? Normal couples didn’t have their dates in hospital rooms. But we weren’t a normal couple. In fact, I wasn’t even sure we were a couple.
“I’m not mad at you.”
“That’s a relief.” He dropped the keys on the bedside table and took over the bottom half of my bed. He leaned forward as if to kiss me, then I guess he changed his mind. The rules were so confusing. He asked, “So what happens next?”
“Tomorrow they’re testing all the motors and gears, but they won’t find anything wrong.”
“You’re really—what would you say?—not sick anymore?”
“I’d say healed.”
“Heavy.”
“I don’t expect you to understand it.” It was awkward for a moment. I pretended to be absorbed in the magazine, and he tried reading the article upside down. I said, not daring to look at him, “You were brave to go out there to the farmhouse.”
“I could have been shot,” Adam teased. “Those guy are NRA types. How’s your Christmas been, considering?”
“In some ways, it was the nicest time of my life, out there at the farm. I wish you could have been there, for the good parts.” I told him about the blackbird and his funeral.
“I get this picture of you all standing around in the snow storm, saying kaddish for the bird.”
“What’s cottish?”
“It’s a Jewish prayer to remember dead people. Animals, too, I guess. But it doesn’t say anything about dying. It’s about life, not death. Weird, isn’t it?”
“Do you believe in life eternal?” Maybe this would be my foothold on Adam’s soul.
“Yeah. That’s an hour in Mrs. Loomis’s class.”
I smiled in spite of myself and wondered who but Adam could joke about heaven and hell. Or did all Jewish people take eternity so lightly?
“I’m sorry I can’t be here for your bone scan tomorrow. It was such a great time last time. But I’ve got to finish my college essays. I’ve got this dynamic paragraph I’m trying to work into all of them. No, it’s okay. I wrote the whole thing myself. I’m a debater. I can tie any two things together.”
God and Jesus? Despite that part of me saying Leave him be, it isn’t right, you can’t do it, I still thought I had to try to win Adam to Jesus. But how? If not through his soul, through his heart? I asked, “How’s Diana?”
“Who knows? She’s in Mexico. Listen, I’ll come over tomorrow afternoon to hear the big report.” He actually tweaked my nose. “You look fantastic, Miriam. I’m not kidding.”
“You’re always kidding, Adam Bergen.”
He grinned. “I guess so. Well, I’ve got to go and figure out what Carleton College expects me to bluff my way through. Don’t run off. Remember, I can always find you.”
“That was a good piece of detective work. How did you do it?”
“Professional secret.” He grabbed a forkful of cherry pie that was left over from lunch. “This is awful. Can I have it?”
“You’re taking nourishment from a poor sick girl? Look at me, I’m skin and bones.” Actually, I’d gained some weight and looked fuller and healthier than ever. He looked closely, with those roguish eyes. I had to say something, I had to. But I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. Instead, I said, “Eat the pie. You need it worse than I do.”
“So, what happens next in your soap opera?”
“I think the judge will send me home. We go to court on Thursday, and they won’t be able to keep me past then.”
“Well, if you’re out by Saturday night, do you want to go to my brother’s wedding?”
A wedding! The perfect place to get my work done. “Sure, I’d love to go.” At that point, after practically being imprisoned for so long, I would have gone anywhere, even to the city dump, just to be going. Mama wouldn’t be wild about the idea, and certainly the men would have a fit, but I would tell them that a wedding was the right place to begin the Lord’s work on Adam. Saturday night I would begin showing God how grateful I was.
The hospital vampire sucked blood from my veins and filled half a dozen tiny glass vials. For the fifth time, the drum of the bone scanner rolled over me. Once again I was strapped to the sliding t
able of the scanner, like a damsel tied to the railroad tracks in an old time melodrama.
Where was the hero to rescue me, I wondered, then reminded myself that I wouldn’t need rescuing, because I was well. More important, Brother James was safe.
I watched the computer draw its pictures of my inner workings. I prayed that there would be no sign of the black walnut that had intruded on my body before.
“Well?” I said, when all was done.
The technician replied blandly, “Your doctor will interpret the results,” but when no one was looking, he gave me a “thumbs up” signal. Anyway, after so many go-rounds, I knew what to look for, and I knew it wasn’t there. The blood tests would be back in the morning, and then they would have no reason to keep me.
It wasn’t that simple, of course. In the morning, when everything came back clear, we had to go to court. Mama and Brother James came for me at 8:00.
Judge Bonnell’s desk was up high, like an altar, and he looked down on us with an uncompromising expression. Mr. Bergen and I sat at a long table with our heads tilted back to look up at him. It reminded me of the scene in the movie The Ten Commandments, when Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets and addressed the multitude of people below, and that reminded me of a joke Adam told me when he realized that my name was the same as Moses’s sister. “What did God say when Moses complained of a headache? ‘Take two tablets and call me in the morning.’” Typical Adamism.
In the courtroom, Brother James, Mama, and the uncles sat in the gallery behind our counsel table. Mama sat perfectly still with her ankles crossed, and Brother James wore his Sunday suit and black boots.
The judge mumbled, “In the interest of Miriam Pelham, Case Number 96JC48, Sedgwick County, State of Kansas, who are the interested parties present for this case?”
Several state-appointed people identified themselves, including Gerri Kensler, my social worker, and the guardian ad litem who was supposed to be representing my best interests. I’d never met her.
