Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  Aidan’s voice whispered in the chaos in my mind. I pushed the laptop harder—off the bed and onto the floor—then clasped my throbbing head with trembling hands.

  I would not. I could not. Not while my son … Inescapable realities battled like spasms in my conscience. My flaws. My failures. My selfish, savaged dreams.

  A groan tore from my throat as I scrambled off the bed, tears streaming, and retrieved the laptop from the floor. My fingers shook as I wrote a note to Sullivan. “I’m going off-line. My boy is injured. He may be dying. And … I just can’t. You have our phone and I’m attaching the hospital’s. Can you keep our contact list updated? And my parents too. I know I’m putting a lot on you, but I just—I can’t anymore.” I knew she’d understand.

  I gave her the number I’d promised, found clothes and pulled them on, then stormed down the stairs with the laptop in my hands and out the kitchen to the shed. I shoved it in the bottom drawer of Sam’s tool cabinet and kicked the drawer closed with my foot. Then I clicked the padlock on the shed’s door back into place and pressed it closed.

  I returned to the kitchen empty-handed, determined and broken, freed and imprisoned. I was a mother. I—was—a—mother. Above all, with every fiber of my being, I was a mother.

  There was no time to shower. I’d wasted too much already. With snacks, a bottle of water, and a change of clothes stuffed into an overnight bag, I headed out the door.

  I walked past several beds in the ICU toward the space where Ryan lay. After six hours of sleep, my steps felt surer. My outlook clearer. I pulled back the curtain that surrounded Ryan’s bed and found him just as I’d left him, breathing with a respirator, his shattered leg raised, his head and arm bandaged. His color still off—a grayish shade of pale. But he was alive.

  I glanced at the chair where Sam sat. “No change?”

  He shook his head. I looked at him, then. Really looked at him for the first time since we’d watched our son jump from that crane. He was unshaven, his face pale. He sat in the plastic chair next to Ryan’s bed, his chin propped on clasped hands, his eyes on the machine monitoring our son’s vital signs. I reached into my bag and handed him a granola bar.

  “You haven’t eaten,” I said.

  He pushed the bar back to me and shook his head.

  “Sam, you’ve got to eat something.” I found his reticence more annoying than concerning. “Starving yourself won’t do Ryan any good.”

  “I’m fasting.”

  That got my attention. “A bit late for that.” I hated the acid in my voice.

  “It’s never too late for God.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Lauren …”

  “Save it.” I dropped my bag on the floor in a corner of the room and went to stand next to Ryan. I brushed the hair off his forehead and let my hand linger there. His warmth felt comforting. “I’m here,” I whispered close to his ear. “I went home to get some sleep, but I’m back now, okay? I’m right here.” I squeezed his hand and hoped he’d squeeze it back. Nothing happened.

  “They’ll try to wean him off the respirator in a day or two,” Sam said.

  “I know.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “But Nyall said not to get our hopes up. Sometimes it takes a couple tries.”

  “I was there, Sam. I heard.”

  He rose from the chair and came to stand by me. He lay his hand on Ryan’s arm, just above mine, and it took all the self-control I possessed not to snatch mine away. I would not give him the power to scare me farther from my son.

  “I’d like for us to talk,” he said. I didn’t like the sureness in his voice.

  “I’d like for you to go home. Take a shower. Get some sleep. Eat. Or don’t. That’s up to you.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood immobile for several minutes. So did I. “Sam,” I tried again. “Go home.”

  He nodded and lifted his jacket from the back of the chair. “Can we talk when I get back?”

  I stroked the skin of Ryan’s wrist with my finger and leaned close. “I’m right here, Ryan,” I said again, hoping he could hear me.

  Sam stood there awhile longer. Then he left.

  We settled into a kind of routine in the days that followed. I took the day shift and Sam stayed at night. Our visits overlapped by a few hours in the morning until Nyall came by with the latest update. Sam would collect his things when Nyall left. We’d exchange shallow words, and I could tell he wanted to say more.

  I relished the hours I got to spend with Ryan alone. He was unconscious and I was spent, but for the first time in a long while, I felt like his mom.

  Eveline came and went, her presence unobtrusive and calm. A doctor’s wife, she was unfazed by the contraptions encasing our son, unafraid to touch him and speak as if he heard.

  “Come on,” she said one afternoon, as we sat on either side of Ryan’s bed in comfortable silence. She stood and took a couple steps, motioning me to follow her. “Come on.”

  I looked at Ryan. “I’m not sure …”

  “Nonsense. We’re not going far, and I’ll give the nurse my mobile number.”

  I hesitated.

  “When was the last time you went anywhere other than this room and your home?”

  “I …” I couldn’t remember.

  “Right, then,” she said, waving me to follow her again. “Let’s go.”

  “Eveline.”

  “Let’s go, luv.”

  I followed her out to the hallway, where she left her phone number with a nurse. Then we walked into the stairwell. “Where are you taking me?” I asked as we started climbing, uncomfortable with leaving Ryan unattended.

  “To breathe.”

  She pushed through a door at the top of the stairs and led me out into the light of day. I squinted at the brightness and took in what I saw. “What is this?”

  “This, my dear,” she said, leading me by the arm to the edge of the hospital’s flat roof, “is a doctor’s best kept secret.”

  I looked past the buildings next door to the mountains outlined in the distance. A faint breeze carried the sound of horns to the rooftop and cooled my skin. Eveline was right. I needed to breathe.

  I felt a broadening in my spirit as I scanned the view. Cisterns on roofs, clothes hung out to dry, earth tones that glowed against the morning sky. The aromas of food being prepared rose, faint but unmistakable, from the homes and streets below.

  We sat on the edge of a protrusion in the roof. I inhaled deeply, then again, conscious for the first time of the tight muscles in my shoulders and the ache in my back.

  “May I speak honestly?” Eveline asked.

  I felt my shoulders slump and nodded.

  She paused before going on. “Nyall and I were just talking last night about the toll of illness on the family.”

  I didn’t want to hear the lecture, but I let her continue.

  “People who have gone through what you have—they’re under unimaginable stress. It’s quite common for them to experience …”

  “Tension.”

  “Yes. And conflict sometimes too. What I’ve seen of you and Sam …” She smiled, sincere and kind. “Trauma can be brutal on relationships.”

  “Even relationships that were already dead?” The words were out before I had the chance to censor them.

  She looked surprised, then her expression gentled into genuine concern.

  “Crippled at least,” I amended.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I knew there were disagreements, but … you’ve hid it well.”

  I laughed and heard the cynicism in the sound. “We’ve gotten good at pretending to be everything we’re not.”

  Eveline seemed to consider what I’d said. “So you came into these circumstances already fragile.”

  Fragile seemed an understatement. Fractured seemed more apt. “Yes,” I said, too tired to divulge more.

  “Lauren, dear, I know I’m speaking out of turn, but I just need to say this once, if you’ll allow
me.”

  I stared at the rooftops of Kathmandu until tears began to blur the image. I nodded my permission.

  “Getting through something like this—it’s almost impossible alone. It’s too overwhelming, too ghastly, really. So if … forgive me for saying it this way, but if you still have any hope of saving your marriage, crippled as it may be, you’ve got to fight for it now. Despite everything else that is sapping your strength. I know something broken can be fixed. I’ve seen it happen. But you’ve got to start now, luv, before it’s too far gone …”

  Her words trailed off. I sat without moving or speaking for a while, weighing resentment and duty. Abnegation and commitment. A forcible reconciliation seemed to me a grievous thing—an artificial truce, mind-ordained and heart-rejected. If what Eveline said was true—and I knew that it was—I wanted my effort to be about more than just Ryan. I wanted to want a relationship with Sam. I just wasn’t sure I was there yet.

  “Nyall thinks Ryan might hear your voice, even in his coma,” Eveline said, startling me. She took my hand and held it firmly in both of hers. “You might consider that he can hear your silence too.”

  I realized how long it had been since anyone had touched me to comfort—to heal—and pressed my gratitude into the hands that still held mine. “I know you’re right.”

  “Ryan will need to know you and Sam are strong.”

  I nodded again, convicted by her kindness, but paralyzed by my anger. I remembered our conversation by the soccer field at the beginning of our life in Nepal. “I think you called it elasticity—when we’d just gotten here,” I said to the woman who’d been more of a friend than I had realized until just then. “The ability to make do. To adapt.”

  “I talk too much.”

  I shook my head. “No. No, you were right. But I think some of us may have been born without it. The elasticity. The courage it takes.”

  “And some of us …” She stopped herself.

  “And some of us choose not to use it?”

  Her expression softened. “I was going to say that some of us seem to lose it along the way. For a host of reasons. Many of them valid.”

  I thought of Sam and his ability to take it all in stride—the different, the unpredictable, the uncomfortable, the untenable. He’d brought to Nepal the power of submission and to our family the inflexibility of mission.

  And I’d brought to it all a reluctance to engage. To risk. To take a stand. I took another breath and headed back downstairs.

  I woke up from a restless sleep to find Sam standing in the bedroom doorway. Only one reason for Sam’s arrival home shredded across my mind. Panic surged through me. I threw off the blanket and crawled up the bed until my back was pressed against the wall, hands over my mouth to muffle the slow moan of the moment’s horror.

  “Oh, no!” I heard my own voice wail. “Sam, no!”

  He came to the bed in three long strides, his face close, his hands pulling mine from my mouth. “Lauren, no. No, it’s not Ryan!”

  I felt the breath freeze in my lungs, hiccup, and hiss out. My face and limbs burned with the aftermath of shock. “He’s … he’s not … ?”

  “He’s okay,” Sam said. He pushed the hair back from my face and leaned closer. “He’s still unconscious,” he half whispered. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Then why … ?” I racked my mind for a reason for his presence. “Why are you home?”

  As the adrenaline of fear receded, the acid of my anger resurged. The grip that had been calming a moment before became a restraint again. I pushed him away and put some distance between us on the bed.

  He opened his mouth to speak and closed it before he’d said anything. He rubbed a hand down his face and expelled a loud breath.

  I glanced at the alarm clock. “Sam,” I said, “why are you home? If you’re staying here, I’ll head back to the hospital. Ryan needs one of us to be there.”

  “We need to fix this.”

  “What?”

  “This—us. Can we just—take a few minutes to talk it out?”

  I shook my head, confused by his urgency.

  “Nyall and Eveline,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve noticed. And the rest of the staff.”

  “Our son is injured. Gravely injured. I’m sure they understand.” I swung my legs out of bed. “You stay here and I’ll go back to the hospital. I’ve gotten enough sleep. I just need to get some things together for—”

  Sam interrupted me. “What can I do to make things right between us?”

  I stopped in the process of pulling clothes out of my drawers, then straightened to face him. “To make things right?”

  “I …” He hesitated. “What you said at the hospital. I heard you. From an … objective point of view, I can see it. I can look back over the past few months and trace Ryan’s descent into …”

  “Hopelessness. Anger.”

  “Yes,” Sam conceded. “What I did, the failures you listed. I look back and I can see those.”

  I knew there should be a stirring of relief in me. A flutter of satisfaction. Maybe even of hope. “But?”

  The man who had always seemed to find the right words was coming up short. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and a muscle twitched in his jaw.

  “But I also see the miracles that led us here, that led me and Prakash into those villages. I see those too—the miracles.” He scratched the back of his head in his trademark gesture of frustration. Then he looked at me with sober eyes. “I know you wish we could undo it all. Go back and do things differently.”

  My voice was low and listless. “It’s too late for that.”

  “But if we could. You’d want that, right? No Nepal. No ministry.”

  I thought of Ryan’s journey. I thought of mine. “Yes.”

  There was a long pause. “But how do we undo God’s direction? How do we doubt the miracles? God got us here—do we doubt him too?”

  Before I could answer, there was a flash of clarity in my mind. Despite the circumstances, it stunned and anchored me. This wasn’t God’s doing. He hadn’t pushed Ryan to the despair that drove him up a crane. Our failures had. Sam’s and mine. The responsibility was ours. Every bit of it—with all its irrevocable, unimaginable damage.

  “I don’t doubt God.” Just saying the words, I realized how long I’d been doing exactly that, how long I’d subjugated my prayers and my serenity to a misplaced blame on God. “I blame us, Sam—the mistakes we’ve both made in his name.”

  “But he called me,” Sam said, a trace of his old passion under the roughness of fatigue. “We’re here because he called us.”

  “Wait—Ryan may never walk again, but it’s okay because God called us? Is that what you’re getting at? You’re saying that you and I can sit by Ryan’s bed in the hospital room in which he’s fighting for his life, and we can be happy and content because God called us to Nepal? So it doesn’t matter that the son he gave us just jumped off a crane? It doesn’t matter that you did more to cause it than to hinder it? That we”—I amended as guilt speared me—“that we did more to cause it than to hinder it?”

  “How can you second-guess—”

  “How can you dismiss our son’s”—I flinched before I uttered the crippling word— “our son’s suicide with platitudes about calling?”

  “Because there’s too much we’ll never understand,” he said loudly, throwing up his hands. “Maybe his jumping is exactly what God wanted! We don’t know! But if we can just hang on to what we do understand, Lauren. Then we can face this together. Without the … the tension between us—the coldness. I want us to be united. To each other and to God. That’s all I want.”

  I took a breath and held it, reaching into reserves I didn’t have for the frayed remnants of my self-control. “What I want is a son who hasn’t been martyred by ministry. I want a son who knows that he came first—before the strangers in a foreign mountain. I want a son who can still see God as I used to—as a loving, protective father who grieves for his children
and tries to rescue them from the ignorance of those who harm them for all the ‘right’ reasons.

  “You find peace by tracing Ryan’s descent into hell and calling it okay because it’s somehow balanced by your ministry? That’s not faith, Sam. That’s insanity. That’s negligence and abandonment! So we can sit in the same hospital room and you can pray to your God all you want. I’m going to pray too. I’ll pray to the God I used to know—the one who gave us Ryan to protect. Who gave us a family to nurture. I’ll pray to that God, and you go ahead and assuage your guilt with prayers to yours.”

  I grabbed a jacket off the back of the chair in the corner and walked downstairs. Sam followed, mute. His face was contorted by confusion and righteous certainty when I stopped to face him. “Tell me the truth, Sam. Did you come home tonight to work things out or to convince me to see things your way?”

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “I am. You’ve got me there. I’m unreasonable. You can stand there trying to convince me that it’s God who wanted us to neglect our son. That what we witnessed three days ago—that our son’s suicide and the desperation that drove him to it—were all part of God’s plan, and I’m the unreasonable one.”

  Perhaps to prove that point, I decided to leave nothing unsaid. “You need to know this too, Sam. When Nyall clears him? We’re going to take Sullivan up on her offer and get Ryan back to the States. I don’t care what your Nepali friends or Nyall or Eveline will think. I’m Ryan’s mother and I’m going to do what’s right for him.”

  I saw disagreement, resistance, and resolve shifting like light patterns across Sam’s face. I remembered Eveline’s warning. Mustering the last vestiges of an exhausted resolve, I added, “One more thing: I’m not walking out on this marriage. I committed to it—to you—for life. I don’t like what it is … what it’s become. But I want to try to fix it because I promised that I’d never let it die—that I’d never settle for the travesty we’re living in. To be honest, I don’t want to, but I’m going to try … for the promises we made before we knew how brutal life could be.”