Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  “I trust you,” he said again. Then he turned and resumed our walk back to the hotel.

  His statement had dismayed me, and I searched my heart to understand why. I wanted him to be worried. I wanted him to fear losing me. I wanted him to question me, then assure me of his love.

  I wanted him to need me enough to fight for me.

  sixteen

  WE ARRIVED BACK AT THE HOSTEL AND I HEADED TO OUR room to freshen up while Sam went upstairs to get coffee and read the paper.

  As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror wrapping a rough, line-dried towel around my head, the sight of my body halted my movements. With my arms raised to secure the towel, I took stock of what I saw and wondered when I’d stopped defining myself as feminine—a woman whose body and spirit had needs that went beyond perfunctory offerings.

  I lowered my arms and stared into my own face as if it belonged to a stranger, noting the patches of dry skin, the new wrinkles around my mouth. I let my eyes drift down past the sun damage on my neck and chest. It wasn’t Nepal that had robbed me of my womanhood. I knew it had started to wane long before our arrival. Still, as I contemplated this new incarnation of me and compared her to the woman I’d been before the strain of ministry, I wondered how dearly I’d paid for Sam’s cause. For our cause, I reminded myself. A reminder and a charge. It rang hollow in my mind.

  “We’ve got to head home,” Sam said brusquely, entering the bedroom with a note in his hand and heading straight for the suitcase.

  “What?” I reached for another towel and wrapped it around me.

  He held up the paper in his hand. “Eveline called.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Ryan didn’t come home last night.”

  A shiver of dread ran through me. “What do you mean, he didn’t come home?”

  “They were at that movie night he told us about,” Sam said, throwing our clothes into the suitcase.

  “With the soccer team?”

  Sam nodded. “Steven called home this morning. Told his parents Ryan stole some liquor and ran off at some point. No one knows where he is.”

  I didn’t say a word as I dressed and collected the rest of our items, shoving them into our bag while Sam went to pay our bill. I’d already started down the road to town when he caught up with me. I flagged down a taxi. “We can take the bus,” Sam said.

  “We’re taking a taxi.”

  He dropped our suitcase into the trunk and we headed back to Kathmandu.

  The drive was interminable. I tried to squelch the images in my mind. Ryan getting mugged and beaten. Intoxicated Ryan wandering the streets, getting lost and panicking. Ryan stepping out in front of a car and still lying on the roadside in a remote part of town.

  My lungs ached from the strain of breathing calmly. I wanted to curse at Sam for refusing to get a cell phone so we could be in touch with Eveline as we traveled. I begged the driver to go faster and Sam leaned forward to explain that it was an emergency involving our son.

  Nothing registered on the hour-long drive back to Kathmandu. Neither the towns we drove through nor the sights we saw. Neither the swerving to avoid bicycles nor the sudden rainstorm that drenched the road and made it slick. Sam reached across and gripped my hand. I knew he was praying.

  We were driving past Ryan’s school when I saw two police cars at the foot of the crane next to the new gym. A crowd pressed around them. I looked up and heard myself groaning, “Oh, God.”

  Sam followed my gaze and I saw his face go ashen. He stopped the taxi and we both got out and ran, ignoring our driver’s yells to come back for our suitcase. I could think of nothing but the splash of red at the end of the crane’s jib, high above the ground, and the closer I got to it, the clearer the details became—Ryan’s legs straddling the outermost beam, his jeans torn at the knee, his clothes drenched by the downpour that had slickened the metal on which he sat. He seemed oddly relaxed, his arms swinging. My stomach plunged when I saw him casually adjust his position.

  As we got closer, I began to hear his voice. I doubted my ears. He was singing. Bellowing at the top of his lungs. His arms beat an erratic rhythm as a voice I’d never heard come out of him before quavered in a drunken version of his favorite childhood song. “Jesus loves the little children,” he wailed, “all the children of the world.”

  We were close enough now for people to see us. The crowd gathered at the base of the crane parted, and Eveline, who had been speaking with the police officers, hurried over to us. “We don’t know how long he’s been up there,” she said, and I could hear the effort it took for her to speak calmly. “Someone called it in to the police about an hour ago and we came as soon as we heard. They’re afraid to go up there and scare him into falling.”

  Sam brushed past her and went straight to the officers who stood at the bottom of the crane. They showed few signs of urgency. He gesticulated and tried to make himself understood while Eveline hung on to me as if she was afraid I’d faint. I figured she’d seen my legs buckling as I’d run to the place where my son sat unsteadily above a ninety-foot drop.

  There was a commotion by the school’s main gate as several men came out carrying high-jump mats the students used in gym class. They placed the two thickest ones side by side right under the place were Ryan still straddled the jib’s outer beam, then ran back inside as one of Ryan’s teachers barked orders I couldn’t make out.

  I clung to Eveline, my eyes riveted on Sam as he climbed the crane, moving slowly and surely on the slippery rungs.

  “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,” Ryan continued to scream from his dangerous perch. “Jesus hates the little children of the world.”

  There was a nearly palpable halt in the nervous chatter around the base of the crane. Ryan had accentuated the verb so clearly that no one could doubt what they’d heard. That’s when the tears came. My eyes had stayed dry when I’d shot out of the taxi and run toward my son. It might have been panic that had kept me from crying as I’d stood there with friends and strangers staring at me, as I’d watched my husband climb a treacherous structure, as I’d sent up the same desperate prayer I’d breathed on so many occasions before—Please, God. Please.

  But when my son screamed, “Jesus hates the little children of the world” for all assembled to hear—that’s when my defenses finally collapsed under the terror and guilt and shame and horror of the moment.

  I pressed closer. “Be careful,” I sobbed to Sam from the bottom of the crane. “Oh, please—God, please.”

  My voice must have cut through the fog in Ryan’s mind. He stopped singing and twisted on the beam to look down, scanning the crowd before finding me at the bottom of the crane. “God?” he yelled, a hysterical edge to his voice. “You’re praying to God to help me?” And then he laughed in a way that chilled me. “What a joke,” he spat at me.

  “Ryan,” I pled. “Please don’t move …”

  He edged farther out on the crane’s jib. His voice was shrill and cynical as he intoned a sort of chant. “Please, Jesus, help my son. Please, Jesus, make people send money. Please, Jesus, can we leave this eff’in’ country? Oh, and please, Jesus, don’t let anybody find out that I’m in love with some guy back in the States …”

  Sam froze and I felt a wave of nausea cramp my stomach. He looked down at me with an expression I couldn’t read. The silence all around me was deafening.

  “Ooh—burn!” Ryan continued, his voice maniacal and shrill. “What, did you think it would be our little secret?”

  “Ryan, I told you—” I heard the protest as it escaped my lips and hated myself. I hated that I was preparing to utter guilty excuses to a son who sat in mortal danger. How low—how horribly low—had I sunk? “Just come down from there, Ryan. Please. We can talk about this. We can figure it out. Please, Ryan. Come back down before you …” I ran out of breath and seemed incapable of drawing more into my terrified lungs. My legs buckled and Eveline held me upright.

  Sam was a
lmost level with the beam on which Ryan sat. “Ryan?” his voice was calm and firm. How I envied him the ability to master his emotions.

  “Oh, hey, Dad!” He sounded cheerful and sincere, but his eyes were crazed.

  “Ryan, I want you to scoot along the beam toward me. Can you do that?”

  “Why, Dad? Why do you want me to scoot along the beam?” he mocked.

  “Because it’s dangerous up here.”

  A derisive smile contorted his face. “And you care?”

  Sam flinched. I saw his grip tighten on the metal rung he was holding.

  “I care, son,” he said.

  Ryan’s voice rose another notch, hysterical and shrill. “You care?” And then he laughed. He laughed so hard he lost his balance and had to fall forward onto his stomach and clutch the beam to keep from slipping off. And still he laughed.

  Sam blanched. I saw weakness and fear erode him in an instant. He kept a grip on the ladder, but there was indecision and lostness in his countenance, two emotions I’d seldom seen in him before.

  When Ryan’s laughter had run dry, he pushed himself back up to a seated position and seemed to take in the situation with fresh eyes. He scanned the crowd below, saw the police officers standing by, looked at me where I stood weak-kneed, and let his eyes slide up the crane to where his father clung hollow-eyed and desperate.

  “Slide over this way, son,” Sam said in a voice so soft I could barely hear it.

  “‘Son’?” Sarcasm dripped from the word.

  Sam flinched again. “Yes, Ryan. Come over this way …”

  “Son?” Ryan shrieked again, oblivious to his dad’s prompting. “I’m not your son! Those little village kids? They’re your sons, Dad!” He stretched out the last word in a sarcastic sneer. “Go save their souls. I’ll be fine up here without you!” He paused, eyes wide and mouth agape. “What? Nothing to say? Come on, Dad, preach one of your sermons. The one on sacrifice—that’s my favorite. ‘If we don’t make these sacrifices, who will?’” He quoted nearly verbatim from one of the sermons Sam had given while we were presenting our work in churches before Nepal. “It’s all ‘for the kingdom’!” he yelled, then dissolved into laughter again. At some point, the laughter turned to sobs. He lay forward on the beam and wailed while a crowd of our friends and strangers looked on.

  “I love you, Ryan,” Sam said, his voice shaky with emotion. “Ryan … God loves you.”

  Ryan pushed up to a sitting position and stared, incredulous, at his dad. “What?”

  Sam took the question as a sign of softening. “He loves you,” he said again, eagerly, reaching out a little farther toward his son.

  I saw Ryan jolt a little—his eyebrows came together in anger and incredulity. His voice was sharp and cracked as he screamed, “He loves me?!”

  “Sam, stop!” I shrieked up at my husband from where I stood, frozen, afraid the mere mention of God’s name would cause Ryan to ratchet up again.

  He looked down and held out a hand in a silencing gesture, then looked back to his son. “God doesn’t care that you’ve been drinking. He doesn’t care what you’ve said here. He doesn’t care, son. He loves you.”

  There was a sneer on Ryan’s face when he propped himself up just enough to say, “And you think that’s enough?”

  Sam must have drawn on every ounce of conviction he had to answer, “Yes! Yes, son, it’s enough.” He paused and I could see him desperately searching for something to say—something that would pierce through Ryan’s insanity so he could coax him off that crane. “God’s love for you is so much greater than anything you can imagine …”

  “Shut up!” I heard a voice shrilling, then realized it was my own. “Sam—shut up!” I felt a chasm opening beneath me, as if the last shreds of my motherly instincts understood before my mind did the horrible mistake of using God’s name to get to Ryan.

  My son froze. He eyed Sam with something that looked like disbelief and anguish. Then he sat up straighter, swung a leg over the beam, and dropped.

  Four broken ribs, an open femur fracture, a lacerated spleen, two crushed vertebrae, and a severe hemorrhage herniating his brain. Ryan lay in a medical coma, wrapped in a mess of breathing tubes, heart monitors, casts, and bandages.

  My mind had been so focused on my son atop that crane that I hadn’t seen the army of teachers and students that had stacked sports mats and empty boxes under him, moving them as he progressed across the jib. It was the improvised cushion that had saved him from what would have been a certain death.

  He fell soundlessly, though I knew he was conscious when he swung his leg over the beam and let himself drop. He neither screamed nor clawed the air, as instincts would dictate. I watched his body plunge ninety feet toward the ground and felt myself die as he crashed into the pile beneath him. I didn’t move as bystanders raced in. I didn’t think as Sam slid down the crane’s wet ladder and launched himself into the crush of people tending to our son. I didn’t breathe as someone yelled, “Don’t move him!” and Sam’s voice, like a mantra, repeated, “Stay with me, Ryan. Ryan, stay with me!” into the silent shock.

  My legs gave out, and Eveline, who still held me, helped me to the ground. “He’s alive,” she said. “He’s alive.” I heard a keening sound that swelled and agonized. There was a blur in front of me—Eveline mouthing words I couldn’t hear, someone shaking my shoulders, arms lifting me and dragging me to a nearby car. Propping me in the backseat—door open. Then hurrying back to the place where my son lay inside a rescuing circle of friends and strangers.

  Later, I’d remember Nyall Harrington arriving at the scene. He took charge immediately, barking orders when the ambulance drove up, then telling Sam to get in the car with me and meet them at the hospital. With Eveline at the wheel, we followed the Nepali ambulance, a plain white van equipped with neither lights nor sirens. Nyall was the first to jump out when we reached the emergency entrance.

  He stayed by Ryan’s gurney as they pushed him into the hospital. A nurse showed me where to sit. I was surprised to see Eveline still beside me. Sam on my other side. There was a loud fuzziness in my brain, like heavy rain on a metallic roof. I couldn’t really hear past it. Couldn’t think around its fury. The keening had stopped and I knew enough to be grateful for that.

  The following hours were an indistinct series of updates and oblivion. I tried to listen to Nyall, but it felt as if my neurons weren’t connecting. “What did he say?” I asked Eveline after one of his visits.

  “He said Ryan’s …”

  I held up a hand to stop Sam’s explanation. “Not you,” I said, my voice clipped and acidic. Not the man who’d preached our son into a suicidal leap. “Eveline, what did he say?”

  She looked from me to Sam, then back again. “They’re working on him. Trying to determine the full extent of his injuries and stabilize his blood pressure. He’s bleeding from his spleen and they’ll likely have to remove it, but … he’s alive.” She smiled a bit tightly—determined in her optimism. “He’s in the best of hands, Lauren. Really. The best of hands.”

  Hours passed. Sam sat immobile between Nyall’s visits, leaning forward in his plastic chair, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. Eveline got us coffee from the doctors’ lounge and went with me to the restroom when I wasn’t sure my legs could bear my weight. Otherwise, she sat in silence, honoring the survival I hoped was happening just down the hall.

  Ryan went into surgery and Nyall explained to us what would happen. There was something about splinting his femur, fusing his spine, removing his spleen, and relieving the pressure on his still-swelling brain by opening his skull. A specialist visiting from Germany would be performing the operation, one of the foremost experts in his field. “He’s in good hands,” Nyall told us. “I couldn’t have picked anyone more qualified to do this surgery …” He paused. “You can thank God for that,” he said.

  I nodded and looked away. How nice of God to bring a good surgeon into our lives after failing to keep my son from jumping off a
crane.

  Nyall assured us that he’d be right next to Ryan in the operating room. There was minute comfort in that, but comfort nonetheless.

  Ryan got through surgery. “That’s a strong boy you’ve got,” Nyall said. Sam asked a few questions. He’d be kept in a medically induced coma until the swelling went down. There would be more surgeries later. But for now—for now he was alive. I had to be content with that.

  We saw Ryan in intensive care. Sam stood at the head of the bed, a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. He whispered a prayer about healing and praise for his spared life, and it was all I could do not to yell at him again.

  “Shut up, Sam,” I mumbled instead, anger like a vise around my emotions. He went silent, but I knew he was still praying. I sat on the other side of the bed and held my son’s hand. Traced the ridges of his knuckles. Kissed his palm. Lay my cheek against its warmth and fought the urge to pray, unwilling to commit my son to an unpredictable and fickle God.

  Nyall came by again after a few hours. He assured us that Ryan was doing well, considering, and warned us that we’d see little change until they stopped administering the drugs that were keeping him unconscious. “Are you giving him painkillers?” I asked, afraid he might be suffering without our knowing it.

  “He’s well medicated. Won’t remember any of this when he wakes up again.”

  Eveline flagged down a taxi to drive us home and told us she would stay until we’d gathered a few clothes and made the necessary calls.

  Muffin met us at the gate, his cheerful welcome an affront. The bag we’d forgotten in the taxi was there too, probably dropped over the gate by a helpful soul. “Do you want to call your parents?” Sam asked.

  “You call yours first.”

  “Okay.”

  It was the longest exchange we’d had since the accident.

  I heard the Skype call being placed as I closed the door to the bathroom and turned on the tap in the sink. I glanced at my face in the mirror and saw my haunted eyes. Only a handful of hours had passed since I’d stood in the bathroom in Nagarkot feeling sorry for myself.