Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  So I’d searched for a school where I could bolster my beliefs with knowledge and where living in another culture would broaden my worldview. I’d found both in Sternensee’s quirky Christschule, an English-language Bible school where international students came to study and ski—sometimes in reverse order. I’d spent a semester there, basking in a foreign world and accumulating credits that would somehow count toward my bachelor of arts from an American college.

  I’d met my husband there too—something Sullivan had predicted nearly from the moment she met Sam.

  When was it that she and I had started communicating again? Two years ago? Nearly three? Life had gotten in the way after college, and multiple moves had put an end to the Christmas cards that came slipping into the mailbox between Thanksgiving and New Year, leaving sparkles on my hands and a strange wistfulness in my mind.

  I opened Sullivan’s e-mail, bracing for the effusions of enthusiasm I’d come to expect. Three days ago, she had twisted my arm into opening a Facebook account. Chickadee. Chick-a-dee! she’d written. You have got to come over to the dark side. I’ve found every single member of the Sternensee gang, and I’ve got to tell you, while I’ve been maintaining my girlish figure and youthful countenance, these people have gotten appallingly old. Listen, I know you’re not into this sort of thing, but you’re the only one missing from our little reunion page. I could picture her waving a hand in the air as if dismissing something trivial. Just give it a try, will you? You won’t need to sign your name in blood or anything. The gang’ll be thrilled to hear from you!

  Sam was suspicious of Facebook and its power to monopolize one’s time, and though I didn’t have any moral convictions about it, I’d resisted the social networking phenomenon mostly because I disliked fads. But I knew Sullivan. Her powers of persuasion were well honed and irresistible. The timing of my crossover to the “dark side,” as she called it, might have been in question, but the inevitability of it was not.

  So on a quiet evening three nights ago, I’d clicked the Facebook icon and, taking a deep breath, begun to fill in my information. Twice I’d closed the page, telling myself it was the wise thing to do, and headed to another room to grade some papers. Twice I’d returned to the computer, berating myself for my misgivings, and set about entering the information again. The gang’ll be thrilled to hear from you! Sullivan’s words prodded me on.

  As soon as the deed was done, I’d clicked out of the app and gone about my business as usual. I hadn’t opened it again in three days—partly to prove to myself that I was capable of restraint and partly out of nervousness about reconnecting with “the gang.”

  Whatever qualms I’d had, Sullivan’s latest e-mail put them to rest. You did it! What a kick in the pants! Welcome to the realm of the connected and addicted, Chickadee. I promise you will not regret it.

  She might as well have sent a voicemail. Her accent, intensified perhaps by the passage of time, drawled out of the screen as I read.

  Here’s something you may not realize: sites like these are most effective if you actually visit them, which I know requires a bit of a leap into the unknown. So I’ve sent you a message on Facebook—a personalized guided tour. I could charge you for the Sullivan Geary Facebook Tutorial, but since you’re a pal o’ mine, it’s yours for free. So head on over there and open my message. Now. (Are you still reading this? I said—now!)

  I stepped back into the kitchen, just a few feet away from the dining room table, to change out the pitchers. Then I took the pan of boiling water off the stove. With steaming tea in hand, I returned to the dining room.

  I opened Facebook, typed “Sullivan Geary” in the search bar, and scrolled down to her thumbnail to click on it.

  Sullivan’s profile picture, a black-and-white shot of the socialite holding her beloved three-legged Dudley, was perfect. Her hair was stylishly tousled, her makeup impeccably applied, and her smile as orthodontist-straight as any movie star’s, but the dog she held—a mix of unknown origin, one ear higher than the other, with the stub of one foreleg unapologetically displayed—said more about my friend than any professional portrait could have.

  This was the Sullivan I loved: a polished, charismatic woman in full command of her world, who wielded her status like authority and served on the boards of countless charities, demanding donations by the sheer magnetism of her spirit. And a softhearted empath who had stopped her white convertible on a torrid Savannah day to rescue a stray who’d been hit by a car. The veterinary bills had been astronomical and the outcome uncertain, but she’d fought for that little life like a mother for her child. And Dudley had survived.

  I moved my finger on the trackpad until the cursor hovered over the blue message icon and clicked, then I followed Sullivan’s instructions to a T, choosing my privacy settings, deactivating e-mail notifications, and trying to figure out the difference between walls, newsfeeds, profiles, messages, and instant messages. Despite Sullivan’s strong recommendation, I balked at uploading a photo and declined Facebook’s offer to help me find friends.

  After an hour or so of stumbling around the site with little evidence that I’d accomplished anything, I took one last sip of my cold tea and prepared to sign out. That’s when I noticed that another red number had appeared on the message icon at the top of my screen. I checked the laptop’s clock. It was almost eleven at night in Savannah. Surely Sullivan, whose beauty rest was a nearly religious concern, was long asleep.

  I clicked the icon and frowned. Aidan D? Then I put down my cup and stared at the screen, my breath catching.

  Aidan?

  I clicked to open the message. The thumbnail next to Aidan’s name was a blur of primary colors, but I didn’t attempt to get a closer look. The words next to it were enough to make me shove the laptop away, incredulous, then draw it closer again.

  hey, ren. is this really you?

  I stared at the words. Willing them to tell me more. Willing them to shift into the shape of his face and confirm that it was he. Ren. No one called me Ren, an odd abbreviation of Lauren I hadn’t heard since—Aidan.

  I shut the laptop’s lid, pushed away from the table, and retreated to the kitchen. Then I laughed at the impulse. I didn’t know much about technology, but I was pretty sure that a computer couldn’t follow me to another room.

  “This is absurd,” I mumbled out loud, a hand pressed to my chest, my eyes still on the laptop sitting on the dining room table. I shook my head. “Ridiculous, Lauren.” Marching back into the dining room, I lifted the lid and squinted at the single line of writing.

  hey, ren. is this really you?

  My fingers shook a little as I moved the cursor over Aidan’s name and clicked. I sat back and took in the information on his page. The banner at the top was blank, but the smaller picture, the one I’d seen as a thumbnail next to his message, was a rugged tree painted in stark, textured red. The brash, unapologetic nature of the art convinced me that this Aidan was the same I’d known from childhood until … I frowned again and felt my heart rate speeding up.

  Aidan.

  two

  JANUARY 1997

  Sullivan squealed as she stopped in a spray of snow and ice, her skis mere inches from mine and perfectly parallel. “Gracious, when that sun drops behind the mountain, visibility turns to mud!”

  It would have taken me half the time to get the same sentence out, but Sullivan’s Savannah drawl turned warm-honey words to cold-morning molasses.

  “I told you another run would be pushing it.”

  “And that’s exactly what sent me back up there, Chickadee!” Sullivan said with a flourish of her ski pole. She flashed her Miss Berkeley County second runner-up smile. “If it ain’t risky, it ain’t fun.”

  I laughed and pulled my red knit hat farther down over my ears, wishing I could radiate a fraction of her zest for life. “I’m going to remind you of that when you’re destitute, married for the fifth time, and all banged up from a skydiving accident.”

  “Bring a bottle of b
ourbon to my bedside and you can remind me of anything you like.” She pointed a pole toward the barely visible hostel on a hill across the mountain village, a building nearly one hundred years old that had been converted by an American organization into a short-term Bible school. Its windows gleamed softly in the darkening evening. “As many great explorers before us have said,” Sullivan declared in a well-modulated, theatrical voice, “Mush, darlin’, mush!” From her lips, the words sounded more like an invitation to decadence than the starter pistol for our long trek home.

  “Whatever you say, Sullivan.” I tucked my scarf more tightly into the neck of my jacket and used my ski poles to push off in the direction of the footpath that led from the slopes to the village. Sullivan followed close behind. Lights were flickering on in the chalets of the Austrian village, and plumes of white smoke rose from their chimneys. Three days into my stay in Sternensee, the sights and sounds of the village still enchanted me. Their beauty lulled me and their otherness surprised me.

  People stopped to stare as Sullivan and I headed home. We’d taken off our skis where the snowy path met the road and carried them on our shoulders, the cuh-cuck of our rigid boots resounding in the quiet streets. Had we walked without speaking, no one would have noticed us making our way from the slopes to the hostel. But silence was not Sullivan’s strong suit.

  She talked. No, she didn’t just talk. She Sullivan-ed. In this stoic mountain village, where qualities like order, modesty, and privacy were prized, Sullivan’s voice cut like a drill sergeant’s wake-up call. I walked alongside my striking friend, mostly invisible and perfectly content that my more common appearance, small frame, and sober countenance made me a less obvious foreigner. Even in the comfort zone of my college back home, I shirked the spotlight, leaving the bulk of performance assignments to more extroverted classmates and happy to help behind the scenes when others elbowed their way onto the lighted stage.

  “You realize people are staring, right?”

  Sullivan stopped and propped a hand on her hip, eyebrows arched. “Lauren. Sweetie. This is the churchmouse version of me. Back home, I’d be speaking twice as loudly and stopping to say hey to every last one of these folks. They should be happy I’m putting this much effort into being sensitive to their culture!”

  As a recovering churchmouse myself, I knew how inaccurate her self-assessment was. Age and increased confidence had allowed me to reach a sort of functional introversion, but I still tended toward a more subdued disposition than Sullivan’s. She stood in tall, loud, shiny contrast to all that was Austrian, while I tried to move, unseen, around the shadowed edges of the culture.

  It was at the beginning of our second week in Sternensee that Craig Peters—the lanky, sixty-year-old former competitive skier from Minnesota who now directed the Bible school—interrupted our evening in the lounge to introduce us to a new arrival. His name was Sam. He’d come late because of passport problems. He’d be with us for the rest of the semester and would be rooming with Rudy.

  There was a moment of awkward silence after Craig left the room. Sam stood there with a backpack over his shoulder and a suitcase at his feet. He didn’t seem insecure, just curious as he glanced around the lounge, taking off his jacket and scarf.

  “So this is Sternensee.” He grinned and held out his arms in a what-do-we-do-now gesture. There was confidence in his stance and in the tilt of his chin. A couple of the guys rose to greet him and offered to show him to his room.

  Sullivan’s elbow connected with my ribs as they exited. “One—those eyes!” she said. “Lashes to die for!”

  “Sullivan …”

  “Two—that sweater. Those khakis. Loverboy’s got style.”

  I angled a disapproving look at her. “Loverboy’s been here thirty seconds—”

  “Three,” she interrupted, a hand on my arm and her eyes on the door. “There’s a chance this man is God’s will for your life.”

  “Wow,” I said, laughing. “If God’s using you to prophesy my future, he does indeed work in mysterious ways.”

  Sam and his new friends walked back into the room, and Sullivan made a production of offering him some Ovo.

  “I’m sure I’d love some, but I have no idea what it is,” he said, eyeing the can of brown powder in Sullivan’s hand.

  There was something about his voice that caught my attention. Something sharp and smooth. A vibrancy. A sincerity. He gave Sullivan a lopsided smile as she went on about the health benefits of nutrient-rich Ovomaltine and America’s loss for not having discovered the chocolate malt drink. A few seconds into her speech, he held up a hand to stop her.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Sam said, his smile seeming to soothe some of Sullivan’s discomfiture, “but I don’t think we’ve officially met. I’m Sam.”

  “Sullivan.” She shook the hand he extended, then giggled and said, “Where are my manners? Fly a Southern girl to Austria and her entire upbringing goes out the window.”

  “Not bad manners at all,” Sam said, releasing her hand. “And I’d love to have a cup of that … stuff you’re offering.”

  While Sullivan prepared the drink for him, the rest of us introduced ourselves, welcoming him into our little group. Though he’d just arrived, he subtly took control of the dynamics that evening. When Sullivan attempted to insert herself into a more prominent role, he shifted the conversation to include all those present. It was an admirable trait—one that flowed from Sam naturally. The students seemed drawn to it. They engaged with him in a slightly more energetic way than they had with others, their guards lowered by the sincerity of his interest.

  I watched from my chair in the corner of the room, tamping down the single-girl question that seemed ubiquitous to first meetings with charming single men. Is it him?

  I instructed my mind to pipe down and shook my head at the silliness of the question. I hadn’t flown to Austria to meet potential mates, and I was not one of those women who counted on marriage to seal their self-worth. But as I observed the stranger weaving himself into our tight-knit group within minutes of his arrival, I couldn’t help the curiosity that swelled in spite of me.

  Sam was just beginning his second cup of Ovomaltine, served again by a somewhat deflated Sullivan, when he looked at me and said, “Lauren, right?” I nodded. “Tell me about you.”

  It didn’t take long for Sullivan to decide that Sam was interested in me.

  “He’s not interested, Sullivan,” I said one day, as we rode the ski lift to the top of Hochkönig.

  Sullivan would have none of that. “He’s smitten.”

  “Sullivan …”

  “There are a few things in this world at which I’m mediocre, Chickadee. Reading men is not one of them.”

  I laughed. “But humility makes the cut.”

  Sullivan turned in her seat, making it lurch and grind. “He talks to everyone—”

  “That’s what I’m saying—”

  “But when he talks to you, there’s something different.” She paused dramatically. “I’m going to overlook the fact that your smile right now is mildly condescending,” she said, “and will instead let you in on the fruit of my keen observation.”

  “Is there an eject button on this chairlift?”

  “We’ve established that he has impeccable etiquette. He looks straight at a person when he talks, and he listens with his eyes and his ears. Very rare—very rare indeed. But when he talks to you?” She paused, ostensibly to let the suspense build before going on. “Notice this next time—when he talks to you, he leans forward a little. Not much. Just enough to tell anyone watching that this woman—this woman with the fair skin and sleek hair and the …”

  “Crooked eyetooth.”

  “Oh, hush. It just gives you more character.”

  “Right.”

  She went on undeterred. “The way he leans in, all attentive and enraptured, tells anyone watching that this woman right here has his undivided attention.”

  “Enraptured?”

 
“The subtext is: ‘Don’t interrupt—this is important business.’”

  “Sullivan,” I laughed, “we’ve got to get you home to Savannah so you can go back to meddling in your own life.” She raised an eyebrow, and I patted her knee. “I’ll watch for the lean.”

  “You’ll find I’m right.”

  It bothered me to admit it, but I had to conclude that there was some genius in my friend’s assessment of Sam’s body language and intentions. By the fourth week of the Christschule semester, I knew when I headed for the slopes in the afternoon that Sam would arrive in the ski shed outside the hostel right after Sullivan and I got there. He’d join us on the long walk through town and, yes, lean in when he spoke to me. He’d drift in and out during our time on the slopes, sometimes going solo, other times joining the Norwegian contingent for some high-octane descents, but the moment we headed for home, he’d be there, skis on his shoulder, ready to go.

  Sam brought to our friendship the same steadfast drive he brought to his studies and his goals—a focused, no-nonsense energy, a pursuit of well-iterated objectives. Living in such close quarters, I had plenty of time to observe him. He was an avid learner. Not the type who challenged professors for sport or asked questions merely to draw attention to himself. No, Sam Coventry was engrossed by the subjects he’d come to learn about. He was eager in his quest for knowledge, often stumping our professors with his theological queries or baiting them into debate with the intensity of his disagreement. I admired his zeal and knowledge, but sometimes wondered at the rightness of his methods.