Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  Already, Sam was trying to communicate, buoyed by his online exploration of the language. I marveled at his temerity. He Namaste-d everyone he approached, smiling and bowing, asking questions and getting answers he couldn’t understand.

  I, on the other hand, was just trying to keep it together. Marrow-deep fatigue weighed me down—limbs, heart, and mind. The noise pummeled me. The chaos abraded me. I rested a hand on my eleven-year-old’s shoulder and he didn’t pull away. He stood close to me, closer than he normally would, his discomfort drawn to mine.

  When a porter had loaded our nine suitcases onto his cart, we moved out of the dark terminal into a dusty, horn-saturated sunlight and crossed the narrow street. A wiry middle-aged man stood on the other side with a sign that read Couentry. Close enough. Sam waved and he came toward us, hands pressed together, offering a terse but cheerful Namaste. He led us to the beat-up Mitsubishi van wedged into a too-small parking space and loaded our fifty-pound bags into the trunk and rear seat as if they weighed nothing.

  “We go,” he said in a high-pitched, sharp voice. “We go! We go!”

  Ryan and I climbed into the backseat and Sam rounded the van to the passenger door, realizing when he got there that it would be on the left side in this country.

  He laughed as the uncle Prakash had sent to meet us careened down a wide, encumbered boulevard, slamming on the brakes, accelerating wildly, whiplashing us with abrupt turns and lurches, all the while sounding his horn and blurting words none of us understood.

  We knew he’d drive us to the home Prakash had arranged for us. We knew we’d be met there by the wife of a doctor who had championed Prakash’s school. We knew she’d be able to give us a crash course in living Nepali. We knew we’d see our friend when he arrived in the city three days later, fresh from the exploration of potential target villages.

  That’s all we knew.

  “What is your name?” Sam yelled at our driver over the noise of the racing engine.

  He merely smiled and nodded and forged ahead.

  Sam tried again, articulating slowly. “Your name,” he yelled. He pointed at himself. “Me—Sam. I am Sam.”

  The driver nodded and smiled again.

  “You?” Sam asked, pointing at him.

  “Binod.”

  “Binod?”

  “Yes, yes!” Binod said, pointing at himself.

  “It’s very nice to meet you!” I watched the exhilaration pour from Sam’s countenance.

  “Binod!” our driver answered.

  He veered off the main road onto what could only be a back alley. It was narrow, deeply potholed, and crowded with men on motorcycles, women carrying children on their backs, and mangy, wandering dogs.

  Binod lay on the horn and bounced us through passages that seemed too small to accommodate the width of our creaking, quaking van. Pedestrians leapt calmly out of our way, then filled the gap we left in our wake. A man pushed a bicycle into our path and didn’t stop to glance at the big white hunk of steel surging toward him. Binod slammed on the brakes and dodged, narrowly missing a cement step jutting out from a dilapidated building.

  “Wow,” Sam yelled over the noise. I thought I could hear a hint of fear in the excitement of his voice. “This is … crazy!”

  Binod took his eyes off the road to smile in Sam’s direction, hit a pothole the size of a crater, and snapped his attention front again, shifting down but barely slowing as he breached an intersection.

  We turned onto a wider road, this one lined with stores and shoppers. We hurtled by a man with a mountain of fruit on the back of his bicycle, barely missed another carrying huge bundles of clothes on his head, and finally turned down a narrow, quieter alley with just inches to spare on either side of the van. We pulled up in front of a seven-foot metallic gate, and Binod jumped out, coming around the van to open our doors.

  “Welcome home,” I said to Ryan, hoping the smile that was sapping the last of my energy looked sincere and cheerful.

  He stumbled out of the van and threw up.

  When Prakash had told Eveline about our arrival and explained that he’d be gone for the first three days of our stay, she’d immediately offered to help out. It was one of the qualities that had drawn me to this no-nonsense English woman, whose sturdiness of spirit was a comforting thing. She’d been waiting when we drove up and had immediately tended to our taxi-sick son.

  In the days before we landed, she’d purchased a few of the basics we’d need and had loaded our fridge with food her housekeeper had prepared for us. She’d also gathered dishes and cooking materials at an expat flea market and had arranged them in our rudimentary kitchen.

  “Oh, no—don’t drink the tap water!” Eveline exclaimed when Sam poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen tap.

  He froze with the glass halfway to his lips.

  “You’ll be sick for days. Feces in the water.”

  Ryan looked at me with saucer eyes.

  Eveline went into the pantry and came out with an armful of water bottles. “I got these for you to use until we can get you a filtration system. The last family took theirs with them.”

  Our house’s previous owners had been friends of Eveline’s, so she was able to give us the kind of tour that pointed out both the obvious and the less obvious. She told us that toilets in Nepal wouldn’t evacuate soiled paper and showed us the small garbage cans where we should throw it instead. About the third step from the top that was taller than the others (“Tripped over that one myself!”), and the spot in the dining room where the neighbors’ Wi-Fi was strongest.

  “I’m not sure we’re comfortable using someone else’s signal,” Sam said.

  I glanced at him. Dead on his feet and still a bastion of morality.

  Eveline invited us on a short walk into town. “It will keep you upright and moving. You’ll never get over jet lag if you nap on your first day. And more importantly,” she added, “the sooner you get the lay of the land, the faster this planet will feel more like home.”

  Planet. The word rang true. Beyond the foreignness of sights, sounds, and odors, there was an otherness to this place that felt like a physical dislocation. Every one of my senses perceived it, but I knew I’d be incapable of accurately articulating it. All I could do, as Eveline had suggested, was try to wrap my mind around the reality of it.

  So we went upstairs to change into clothes more suited to the heat, in bedrooms we all knew would have to become home somehow. Ryan stumbled over a step and caught himself, the weariness of two days of travel a visible burden. He walked into the bedroom he’d chosen—a high-ceilinged space with a view on our courtyard—and turned to close the door. Our gazes locked and held, exhaustion in his and, I hoped, expectation in mine. I whispered a prayer when the latch clicked shut and locked him out of sight.

  When we met Eveline in the foyer again a few minutes later, there was a sense of purpose livening my steps. I looked into Sam’s eyes and knew his dark circles matched mine. So did the resolve in their depths. The questions we’d wrestled with since his first meeting with Prakash were moot now. This was our new world. The ramifications of our choice loomed large in the jet-lagged vacuum of my mind, so I clung to the certainty Sam had proclaimed from the start: this was the right place for us. This was God’s place for us. I patted Ryan’s drooping shoulders and squared mine.

  Then we all left the house and stepped into the sunlight.

  After our walk and after Eveline left, telling us that it was late enough for us to go to bed, the three of us sat in the living room on the couch she’d secured for us, just staring straight ahead. Then Ryan started to cry.

  “Ryan,” I said, squeezing the knee of the stoic eleven-year-old whose tears fell silently onto his cheeks. “Ryan, what’s going on?”

  He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, digging deep for self-control. “There’s poop in the water!” he blurted out. We’d been bombarded with so much “different” in our first stroll around town—the stray dogs, the lawless drivi
ng, the Namaste-ing, the mysterious foods, and unrecognizable language. But I had to agree with my overtired son. Of all the newness, “poop in the water” won the prize.

  While Sam began a weary lecture on filtration systems and preventative measures, I shuffled upstairs and began to unpack.

  As we all came to grips with the alienness of Nepal in the days that followed, Eveline continued to offer her assistance, her gentle spirit a balm in our change-saturated lives. She soothed our culture shock with a positive perspective and offered practical solutions to myriad small challenges. After a few days setting up our household and acclimating to the new time zone, she offered to go with us to Ryan’s school and help with the formalities of getting him enrolled.

  “That over there is going to be a gymnasium,” she said as we walked down the paved laneway to the gates of the school. A crane stood in a vacant lot where the walls of a half-finished structure stood under an overcast sky. Just beyond the new construction was a muddy expanse of land bookended with goalposts that had seen better days.

  “Is that a soccer field?” I asked, mostly to point it out to Ryan.

  She nodded. “The students use it all the time for gym and intramurals. Even in monsoon season, when it doubles as a mud pit! My son, Steven—I’ll have to introduce you to him, Ryan—plays on the soccer team.”

  Ryan’s eyes stayed on the field until we turned a corner and entered the gates of the International School of Greater Kathmandu.

  Part Two

  PRESENCE

  nine

  SAM WOULD BE HOME BY NOON IF ALL WENT ACCORDING TO plan, a phrase that was downright laughable in a country where plans were better made in retrospect, and Ryan would hopefully be home shortly before that. I felt Aidan’s message like a veil over my thinking. A veil tinged grey with resurrected murkiness. With Sam’s return, my focus needed to be clear—locked full and unhindered on the man I’d married.

  So before putting the laptop away, I opened Aidan’s message again and typed a few words. I hoped they would be sufficient.

  Aidan—time and words fail me again. Sam returns today and will be home for a week.

  I’m grappling with the ramifications of “this.” Not in any way regretting reconnection (please believe that) nor wanting to shirk the gift, the honor, the pain of inviting me into this chapter of your journey. You compare me to a splash of color in the beigeness of your life, and I realize how luminescent your imprint on mine was. Is. Present tense.

  So there is nothing selfish about this precarious, bright, fluid place you’ve brought me to. It has galvanized my life with a richness and vitality that is so unique to you. To you and me.

  So I stand with you. I weep with you. I fear with you. I grieve with you. I hope with you. And though you’ve only hinted at your faith, I want to say I pray with you. I am not going anywhere.

  But I’m also intimately conscious of the danger of this bonded pain. I want to be sober in my perspective and grounded in my reality. There are two universes vying for my attention and I’m not sure how to balance them. But I’ll live with that tension because it is the overflow of this tortured rediscovery.

  I’ll need to communicate less frequently in the coming week. It’s hard and good and right. But I will read your words as they come to me, maybe jot a very brief response if time and presence of mind permit. I want to be clear so you’ll interpret any silence correctly.

  And since you said to ask …

  I want to know about your treatment.

  I want to know about the God piece.

  I want to know about your heart.

  I guess I’ve always wanted to.

  Ren

  Muffin didn’t bark when the gate swung open.

  “Ryan, Dad’s home!” I called up the stairs, stepping out of my slippers and into street shoes to go outside and greet him.

  What a sight he was, when he returned from his three-week excursions into parts of Nepal few foreigners saw. He carried his battered, oversized backpack deflated from the generosity of his time away. His hiking boots were caked with dried dirt, there was a tear just below the knee of his pants, and his jacket was faded with dust. Thick stubble covered his face and neck.

  He smiled a little wearily as he ambled toward the front porch, dropping the backpack off one shoulder and holding his free arm out to me. I entered his embrace and wrapped my arms around his waist. He smelled of nature and pollution and too-few showers.

  “Is that chili I smell?” he asked, tossing his bag onto our porch to be dealt with later.

  “Really?” I asked. “That’s what you’re leading with?”

  He hooked an elbow around the back of my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. I leaned, surprised by how much I needed it. “Suman made us chili for lunch,” I explained when he pulled back to look at my face.

  “Again?”

  I turned to enter the house. “She insists that you need ‘Western food’ for your first meal home, and I think chili is the easiest dish in her repertoire.”

  “And I insist every time that I’m happy with traditional food—there’s a breakdown in this communication,” he said, smirking at our housekeeper’s stubborn streak.

  Ryan was standing in the kitchen when we came inside. Not in the entryway—as if he wanted to see his dad but didn’t want to appear too eager.

  “Hey, kiddo!” Sam grabbed him into a hug and kissed the top of his head.

  “Hi.” Quiet word, sullenly spoken.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sam poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot I’d made, then looked at Ryan. “You got your book bag?” he asked.

  Ryan knew the routine and knew there was no changing it. He retrieved his bag from the bench inside the door and moved—shuffled, really—into the dining room. They sat down at the table and Ryan showed him all he’d done in the past three weeks.

  “You stink,” he said. He always did.

  “I’ll take a shower once you’ve shown me your stuff.”

  Sam had determined early on in our Nepali life that his first minutes home after treks out of town would be all about Ryan. I suspected he feared that our son didn’t understand the necessity of his absences. In those first few months, I’d seen the ritual as a good thing—a sign of his devotion to being Ryan’s dad. He’d coax him into the courtyard to play catch or challenge him to a free-throw competition. Ryan would submit to it with the same kind of dark deference he applied to most things now, but every so often, I’d glimpse a brightening.

  After Miss Moore’s revelations about Ryan’s academic standing, though, Sam had moved their reconnecting indoors and traded fun for academic scrutiny. Ryan still came first. Second, really, after Sam’s beloved cup of coffee. But there was nothing connective in this altered ritual. And though I still saw fatherliness in Sam’s concern for his son’s grades, his attention felt tutorial, not celebratory or warm.

  Sam pored over Ryan’s schoolwork, expressing his affection with the time and focus that would otherwise be spent on the shower he so desperately needed. I listened to him asking questions about the papers Ryan handed him while I finished making cornbread. Every so often, he pushed a paper over with more willingness than others. “I got an 82 on this one,” he’d say in his lifeless voice.

  “That’s fantastic,” I’d hear Sam answer. “Where did you lose those eighteen points?”

  Sam thought he was doing the right thing. No amount of reasoning could dissuade him from that certainty. He thought he was a good father to a difficult son. From all appearances, Ryan thought Sam was an absentee father to a screwed-over son. I suspected there was no bridging that kind of perspective gap.

  It had taken me a few months to realize that each of Sam’s returns seemed to push Ryan further into himself. Initially, when Sam was gone, there were moments when our son seemed to forget about being sullen—brief windows of time when I’d catch him grinning at something he was streaming on his laptop or when he’d sit at the dinn
er table and offer words that were neither coaxed nor reticent.

  Now, the days before Sam came walking through the gate seemed to mark a deepening of Ryan’s resentment—a more intense rejection of our lives in Kathmandu. It was expressed by silence. By distance. And every time Sam left, I got less of Ryan back.

  It was a reality I struggled to accept.

  After a short shower, Sam joined us in the kitchen.

  “Nice,” I said after a kiss that was blessedly devoid of facial hair.

  “Thought you’d like it.”

  “So—tell me about your trip.”

  It took Sam nearly three hours and several bowls of chili to recount the adventures of his latest excursion. He described the challenges of getting through a mountain pass obliterated by a landslide and of using a gap-toothed bamboo bridge to cross a deep ravine.

  I had no delusions that Sam’s work was a safe thing. While friends parroted easy truths about the center of God’s will putting us beyond harm’s reach, I lived with the certainty that life as I knew it, such as it was, was contingent on mud not sliding, viruses not spreading, wild animals not attacking, and Sam not over-risking.

  I loved the vivacity in his voice as he told Ryan and me about his latest adventures.

  “You should have seen them,” he said around a bite of bread. “We trekked two and a half days from the last bus stop in the mountains to this village so far back into the valley that I thought we’d followed the wrong coordinates. And there they were. Probably fifty, sixty adults and children.” He nodded his thanks for the coffee I poured and went on. “Prakash was great—always is. Talked to the village leaders first and explained what we were doing. They’d already heard about us from the time we spent just up the valley in December.”