Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  “Working on it. Correction, Sullivan’s working on it. We should be able to get the equipment trucked in and a team there to install it this summer.”

  There was irony in the central role Sullivan’s help had come to occupy in our ministry. Who would have thought, when we lived in Austria together, that she would become a linchpin in the ministry of the maverick who routinely dismissed her? I dipped a jug into the barrel and started to water the plants that lined the rooftop patio.

  “Speaking of Sullivan … ,” I said, feigning deep interest in plants I generally starved to death. “She called after you’d gone to bed last night.”

  He took a sip of coffee, clearly expecting bad news. “What is it this time? Red tape? Donors backing out?”

  I took a deep breath and stopped what I was doing. “The Sternensee gang is buying us tickets for a trip back to the States.” I said the words as casually as I could, scanning Sam’s face for any sign of displeasure.

  “They … what?”

  I put down the watering can and took a step or two forward, trying to pick words that would appeal to his priorities. I wondered when I’d started managing his responses.

  “They want us to be able to see our friends and family. We can pick our dates and Sullivan will book the tickets. Anywhere we want to go. Isn’t that amazing, Sam? We could start at your parents’ … maybe borrow one of their cars to drive out to Indiana and see mine.” Sam’s eyebrows were drawn. “I made a list of the people we’d be able to see fairly easily if we gave it two weeks—three weeks max.”

  “Lauren, it’s a really generous gesture, but …”

  “We’ve been here for more than two years, Sam. Our parents are getting older, and Ryan—it might be really good for him.”

  He put his cup down and moved to stand by the railing. “I wish Sullivan had talked to me before getting your hopes up.”

  “You were in bed. And since when do you need to screen my calls?”

  He turned and leaned back. “We said we’d be here for a four-year term before heading back to the States.”

  “Because we didn’t have the funds to fly back in between, but this would be entirely paid for.” I heard my voice rising and tried to temper it. “I mean—it’s a gift, Sam. No money out of pocket.”

  “It’s not just about the finances.”

  “Right. It’s about seeing family and friends and taking a break. Come on—we’ve been here over two years. Surely we’ve earned a couple weeks off.”

  He looked at me as if that argument were ridiculous. “People aren’t supporting us so we can take a vacation.”

  I wished I’d been surprised by his hesitance. “But this wouldn’t cost them a penny.”

  He shook his head and held up his arms, as if it were all out of his control. “Even without the risk of offending our supporters, I couldn’t leave Prakash here alone to continue without me.”

  “Two weeks. Three max!”

  “I’m not comfortable with …”

  I felt the dream slipping out of my grasp. “So maybe just Ryan and I go. I want you to come with us, but if you can’t … Maybe just the two of us can head out for a couple weeks.”

  “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we came for four years,” he repeated, talking to me like I was a child. “You, me, and Ryan.”

  “We did,” I said, a hard edge to my voice. “We came for four years. And it’s been hard.”

  “It’s been challenging.”

  “Really? You’re going to play semantics with this?”

  He shook his head, frowning in confusion. “Lauren … what’s the big deal? We planned to stay four years and we’re still staying four years. Nothing has changed except Sullivan’s offer.”

  “Exactly,” I exclaimed. “That’s what’s changed. Last week we couldn’t afford it and didn’t want to offend our donors. Today we can afford it and we’re not using money from our donors.” I went over to him and pled my case. “Think about Ryan. Don’t you think it would do him good to get a breather from all this?”

  “He doesn’t need a breather.”

  That chilled me. “Excuse me?”

  “He’ll come around. He’s coming around. And taking him back to the States could actually be a detriment to that.”

  “You think he’s ‘coming around’?”

  “Well, he’s not getting any worse.”

  “When did not getting worse become the standard by which we judged our son’s wellness?” I stared him down, hands on hips. “What if getting away from here for a while is exactly what he needs? What if it’s exactly what I need, Sam? What if this is a gift from God and we’re turning it down because we once said—before any of this was remotely a reality—that we were going to stick it out for four years? Correction: because you once said that we would.”

  “Lauren … ,” he said with the same tone he’d used on Ryan when he was being disobedient. “You’re being a little dramatic.”

  I froze. His gaze was as calm and sure as I’d ever seen it. “I’m sorry—did you just say I’m being dramatic?”

  “Maybe not dramatic, but unreasonable,” he said, attempting to pacify me. “It’s not about the free tickets and it’s not about Sullivan offering them. It’s the principle of the matter.”

  “The principle being not ruffling anyone’s feathers.”

  “The principle being that we committed to four years, and I committed to getting back to my villages before monsoon season hits.”

  “Okay, forget me for a minute. Forget the fact that I would love—love—to see my family again.” And take a long hot shower and interact with people who speak my language and go places without taxis and overstuffed buses. I tried to bring Ryan into it one last time, hoping Sam’s father-heart would soften out of love for his son. “Can we just do this for Ryan?”

  “Look, we can go off on rabbit trails and argue the merits of this trip from every imaginable angle, but the bottom line is that it would be unwise to take it.”

  “This isn’t an angle, Sam.” I said his name more forcefully than I’d intended. “It’s our son.”

  “And again, I think he’s doing fine.”

  I felt my blood boil. “Well, I say he hasn’t been fine in well over two years, and maybe we owe it to him to give him a break.”

  “He’s an adolescent boy. It’s a tough age regardless of where you live.”

  “But he’s our adolescent boy, Sam,” I said, leaning in in an attempt to influence his thinking. “He’s dying on the vine.” I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders in defiance. “And so am I.”

  His eyes snapped to mine. “Lauren, if you just take a step back …”

  “No,” I said. “You cannot use your lecturing-professor tone with me on this. Finances? Sure. Spiritual things? Have at it. But when it comes to how I’m feeling and what I need to make it to four years? You can’t lecture me on that.”

  He frowned and crossed his arms. “Why are you getting so upset?” he asked.

  I stared at him, searching his face for any sign of sympathy or conflicted emotion. There was nothing there but certainty. Tears stung my eyes. “Are you really going to turn these tickets down? Are you really going to put the”—I mimed quotation marks—“optics of a trip and a couple weeks of delayed ministry over something good that is being offered to us for free?”

  “Maybe we both need to take some time and think it through.”

  Anger surged in me and I fought to tamp it down. The elation I’d felt since Sullivan’s call yesterday was deflating into a painful reality. I should have predicted it. Part of me had. My reluctance to broach the subject with Sam had been about my fear that this would happen, that he’d dismiss the offer—along with my desperate need—and count appearances and ministry as more important than his family’s sanity.

  I nodded. “You go ahead and think about it, Sam. Go ahead and make believe you’re considering the offer. I’ve never seen that lead to anyth
ing other than your decision standing.” I swiveled and headed for the stairs, fighting the tears that made me feel weak. “Great to have you home.”

  My parting shot sounded petty, even to my own ears. I hated that it had come to this.

  ten

  SIX MONTHS AFTER ARRIVAL IN NEPAL

  Monsoon season had come early. It was wretched and gloomy. I’d seen heavy Midwestern rainfalls before, but nothing like this. Nothing like the sheets of precipitation that swept into us like solid waves. Suffocating humidity would gather during the day, exacerbated by an inescapable heat. The air would turn thick and clingy. Turgid with pent-up rain. And after gathering for several unbearable hours, the storm would break. The deluge would begin.

  Some streets could fill in minutes with a knee-high, slow-moving stew of garbage, sewage, and dirt. Shoes and flip-flops were useless, sucked away by the lukewarm undertow. The rain would fall from afternoon through the night and most often let up around dawn. And the cycle would repeat: intensifying humidity, suffocating heat, paralyzing atmospheric pressure, then a thunderous release, engulfing, inescapable, and toxic.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of monsoon season. Neither the colorful descriptions from other expats nor Suman’s dire warnings. I endured it with the fevered flailing of a drowning woman, clinging to the truth that each day got me nearer to its end and focusing on the silver lining of Sam’s longer-than-usual presence in our home. And for the sake of Ryan, whose first few months had been an emotional monsoon already, I tried to talk down the fearsome floods that roared across the roof and poured over the gutters.

  Sam stayed home for the worst of the season—a brief respite for us from his constant absences. He used the extra time to hole up in the office just a few blocks away, but he was home with us in the evenings. It was good to have him home. It was also a bit bewildering.

  My breaking point came on a Thursday afternoon. I hadn’t wanted to attend the recital at the Kathmandu conservatory, but one of my students was performing and I felt obligated to go. I hadn’t felt well that morning and suspected it was the effect of too little sleep due to the intolerable humidity. I’d promised Ryan that I’d be home before dark to work on a science project with him. It was the first time he’d asked me for any help with his schoolwork since our arrival in Kathmandu—I would not stand him up.

  I’d watched the skies from inside the conservatory, hoping the deluge would hold off just long enough for me to get home. My stomach churned with apprehension as time crawled by. In typical Nepali style, the recital went on longer than planned and I finally left early, tiptoeing out the door in the middle of someone’s overwrought rendition of Vine’s Sonata no. 1. It was a capital offense by music school standards, but I feared I’d already waited too long.

  The skies opened as I was exiting the building and I knew most taxis would head for shelter rather than risk the flash floods that sometimes rushed Kathmandu’s streets in a matter of minutes. I stood there, drenched in seconds by the wall of rain that beat me like a fire hose, unable to see clearly, shivering and helpless.

  When a taxi finally drove by, I practically stepped into its path, ankle-deep in the street and waving my arms. It took several desperate attempts to make him understand where I needed him to take me. At first he refused, pointing at the sky as if I hadn’t noticed the rain. I begged in English and threw in every Nepali word I knew. “Please. My baby.” I made the sign of a mother rocking an infant, not caring at that moment whether it was entirely truthful or not. I needed to get home to Ryan. The driver finally conceded, and added something I didn’t understand, making a categorical gesture with his hands.

  We moved briskly despite the deluge obscuring visibility. I strained to see where we were going and suspected the driver was progressing more from muscle memory than by sight. Fear knotted my stomach and shivers quaked through my body, but a nearly hysterical fixation on getting home to Ryan kept me focused on the road ahead.

  Two things happened nearly simultaneously when we were five minutes from home. We passed a high-riding truck that shot a wave of water under the taxi, and the motor just quit. One second we were progressing at an alarmingly unsafe clip, and the next we were stopped in the middle of the road, motor steaming. Much as he tried, the driver couldn’t get the taxi started again. He screamed at me, I assumed blaming me for the watery demise of his sole income. He gesticulated and yelled and threw up his hands in despair while the churning in my stomach finally found release.

  The diarrhea came in such a furious wave that I had no time to leap out of the taxi. There I was, being yelled at in a language I couldn’t understand, sitting in my own excrement, immobilized by a terrifying monsoon—and still a five-minute drive from home.

  Humiliation incinerated me as my stomach clenched in a cramp so intense I couldn’t breathe. The driver didn’t hesitate when he realized what was happening. He waded around to my door, still yelling, and dragged me out of the car and into the flooded street. He was gone before I was able to stand up straight again, my arms clasped over my stomach, the cramp slightly receding.

  I stood there in the flooded street with diarrhea running down my legs, being pummeled by the torrents falling from the sky, racked with cramps and uncontrollable shivers, and there was nothing I could do. I had no cell phone—Sam considered them unnecessary—and whatever resilience I possessed had succumbed to my illness.

  The terror and helplessness of that moment were a disintegrating force. I wailed. I wailed at the monsoon. I wailed at the taxi driver who had abandoned me so far from home. I wailed at the bacteria I’d probably caught from the toxic water I’d waded through for the past two weeks. I wailed at Sam for not being there, and I wailed at God for bringing me to this abominable country in the first place.

  By some miracle, I made it home. Some of the roads were better than others, but I barely noticed as I walked and staggered, ripped again and again by cramps that had me doubled over or crouching. I was in so much pain and distress that I didn’t bother to duck out of sight to relieve myself discreetly. I knew exactly what this was. I’d been warned about the bacterial infection since day one. It was the reason we showered with our mouths closed, filtered our drinking water, and soaked our fruit and vegetables in iodine. I’d taken all the precautions I could because I’d heard it was so bad, but I’d had no idea.

  I was dizzy and fevered as I trudged on, oblivious to the stares of the few who dared to be in the street under such extreme circumstances.

  It was our baker, Bina, who finally rescued me. She saw me stumbling by her window and came out into the elements. “You okay?” she asked. “You okay?”

  I started to cry. I think she probably smelled my condition before she saw it. There was no hesitation. She placed an arm around my waist and half carried me the rest of the way home, pointing occasionally to make sure we were going the right way. I fumbled with the padlock on our gate and she took the key from my hand to unlock it herself.

  Ryan had called his father at the office when I hadn’t returned when I’d said I would. Sam heard the gate and came running, thanking Bina as he lifted me into his arms and carried me into the house. I caught a brief glimpse of Ryan standing in the living room doorway as Sam kicked the door shut behind us. “Get some hot water bottles, Ryan,” he said, his voice soft but urgent.

  He had to get into the shower with me to clean me. I was shaking so badly I couldn’t stand without assistance. He dried me and helped me onto the toilet, wrapping a blanket around me. Then he carried me up the stairs to our bedroom, repositioned our bed as close to our bathroom as it would go, and took the two hot water bottles Ryan handed him, tucking them around me as he covered my still-shaking form with more blankets.

  He helped me to swallow a pill with warm water and brushed the hair away from my face. I couldn’t stop the tears, and the kindness in his eyes wasn’t helping.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said, shushing me when the tears turned to sobbing.

/>   When I could get a breath and control my voice, I looked him in the eyes and said, “I’m going home, Sam. You can stay here if you want, but I want to go home.”

  “Shhh,” he murmured, stroking my shoulder. “We’ll talk about it when you’re feeling better.”

  It took three days. On the third, I found Sam cleaning out the chickens’ pen. He took note of my clean hair and fresh clothes. “You look like you’re on the mend,” he said.

  I tried to smile. “Almost got through the whole night last night.”

  Sam closed the gate on the chickens’ pen and stepped closer for a better look. “You gave me quite the scare.” There was no judgment in his voice. Only relief.

  I took a deep breath. “I wasn’t kidding, Sam. I want to go back to the States.”

  He started to smile, then realized I wasn’t. “Lauren …”

  I moved to sit on the front steps. The humidity was already building to this afternoon’s downpour. I tried to speak with conviction and certainty, knowing that any sign of hysteria would invalidate my declaration. “I know this is the fulfillment of your dream. I know that, Sam. But it’s … it’s killing me. I don’t want to be here. There’s nothing for me here.”

  “It’s only been six months—”

  “I—want—out.” My voice was hardening.

  He lowered himself to the step next to me and said nothing for a while. “You’ve been sick …”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s been a rough few months, I understand that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I should have been home more when we first got here …”

  I almost laughed. “Sure—that would have been nice. But it wouldn’t really have changed anything.”

  He turned toward me. “It’s getting better, though. We’re making progress. Can’t you see that?”

  I cringed. “Maybe.”

  “So … in another six months, think of how far we’ll have come.”

  He was trying to be sensitive. I could hear it in his voice and see it on his face. The sudden thoughtfulness grated. “Not ‘we,’ Sam. This isn’t about us. It’s about me.”