“When I think that I could have lost you …” I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. His gaze was still on me when I opened them again. “I’m sorry. For every time I should have protected you and didn’t. Ryan, for every time I should have listened to you and didn’t. For letting us stop talking.”
He blinked at the tears in his eyes, but I didn’t hide mine. They were the evidence of my heart for this boy. I’d hidden it too long. “We’re all broken,” I finally said. I took inventory of the bandages, wires, and tubes around his body and smiled. “Some of us in more obvious ways than others.”
He rolled his eyes. It warmed my heart.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “We’ll get help,” I said. “We’ll do the next thing—and then the next.” I leaned in to kiss his cheek, expecting him to turn away.
He didn’t.
nineteen
“LORD HAVE MERCY, I NEED SOME COFFEE!” SULLIVAN SAILED into Ryan’s room in rumpled slacks, a wrinkled blouse, and matted hair. But her makeup was impeccable.
“Sullivan, what are you … ?”
She wrapped me in a Chanel-scented hug. “I told you I’d be here the moment you said ‘Go,’ and if I’m not mistaken, you said ‘Go’!”
I’d called her two days ago with the news that Ryan had been given the all clear. “Well, I am tickled pink!” she’d exclaimed. “Let me round up the cavalry and get your family home!”
“So you’re the cavalry?” I asked, standing in a Nepali hospital room with a woman so out of place that patients and doctors alike were staring.
She moved to Ryan’s bedside and gave him a wink before saying, conspiratorially, “Do you really think I’d miss out on all the fun?”
He just stared at her, wide-eyed, and she looked back at me. “The spittin’ image of his father,” she declared. “Now—who do I talk to about our walking papers? We are leaving in two days, and not a moment later!”
Sullivan took Kathmandu and its hospital by storm. Unbeknownst to Sam and me, she’d spent the past few weeks securing every mode of transportation, piece of medical equipment, and document we’d need for a smooth departure from Nepal. She’d set it all in motion with the flair and aplomb only she could carry off, making new friends—though some reluctant—as she choreographed our exit strategy.
“Samuel Coventry!” She nearly scared him off his chair when she entered our home. He looked up from his typing to Sullivan, then me, then back again. “What’s this I hear about you putting a time limit on your return to the States?” She propped a fist on her hip and raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Tell me! Why are you being so obtuse?”
Sam looked stunned. Sullivan’s brightness was a bewildering force. Her presence. Her loudness. Her demands. They did not belong in Sam’s life here, in a home encased in duty and sobriety.
Though the debate that ensued was civil, I could tell that being called out by a woman whose life and priorities were so different from his irked Sam. He spoke calmly, and Sullivan listened to his explanations. She countered them with common sense, but it was clear she never really expected him to cave in.
A few minutes later, she folded herself into the taxi I’d flagged outside our gates. “You knew going in that you wouldn’t convince him to change his mind,” I said.
“Some spar to win, Chickadee, but with people like that husband of yours, I just spar for sport,” she answered. “The man’s been living in a confrontation vacuum for too long.”
She was right, of course. No confrontation. No call to reason. He’d led our family down this maiming path unchallenged.
Sam was still sitting at the table when I reentered the house. “I guess we should get packing,” I said.
“I’m going to need more time. Two days is …”
“Sam.” I shook my head. “We talked about this. We agreed on this.”
“I can’t leave now.”
I was stunned. “But … you knew this was coming. You were there when I called Sullivan to tell her we were ready.”
“I didn’t expect it to go this fast,” he said.
“You know her. Of course it went this fast.”
“I can’t leave now,” he said again, more firmly this time.
I was starting to believe him. “Sam … Sam, please don’t do this.”
He went back to typing and I looked on, incredulous. “What is this really about?”
He paused but didn’t look up. “I told you. It’s the timing.”
I shook my head. “There’s more.”
He finally made eye contact with me. What I saw in his gaze scared me. “I’m still not sure this is the right thing to do,” he said, resolute.
I bit the inside of my lip and fought for control. “So this isn’t just about delaying our departure.”
His expression told me all I needed to know.
“But you agreed—”
He threw up his hands. “I was trying to appease you!”
“You were … what?”
“I knew you’d eventually come around if you …”
My blood froze. “Sam.”
“If you tried to see this from a different angle. Once you got past the shock of what Ryan did and could think straight again …” He looked me square in the eye, and there was no mistaking his determination. “I have to stay. You go with Ryan so he can get the care he needs, and I’ll follow through with the commitments we’ve made here.” He looked at me with all the confidence, resolve, and influence that had drawn me to him when we met at Sternensee.
“Sam,” I begged, “we agreed.” I stared into his inflexible gaze and raised my hands in incredulity. “How could you let me think that you were coming with us?” The burn of humiliation traveled up my spine. “How could you let me think that you felt the same way I did?”
He leaned against the sink and crossed his arms. “I trusted God to change your—”
“No!” I raised a finger to interrupt him before he launched into another of his speeches on the importance of his work. “You don’t get to use God to excuse your failures again.” I fought the fury that tingled under my skin and made me want to scream. “We’re parents,” I said when I thought I could speak quietly. “We are parents! And if I hear you dismiss that one more time for the sake of—”
“God wants me here.”
I stared at him. That fire was in his eyes again. I knew it well.
“That—is—not—God.” My voice and body shook.
I stifled a sob as I backed out of the kitchen, then turned and escaped into our unkempt front yard. I stood there—holding my head to keep from screaming—wounded and dazed. Desperate. God. Please, God …
My breath caught as lucidity struck me with such intensity that I reached for a tree to steady myself. As my hope dissolved again, I sensed God’s presence—more powerful than my disillusion and more tangible than my grief—and realized he’d been there, waiting and unchanged.
It was Sam’s God I had rejected, not mine.
I felt his comfort like a haunting peace. He was neither cruel nor demeaning. Neither neglectful nor tyrannical. The grandiose idol my husband served had eclipsed the God I’d known before surrender had lost him to me. He was still everything I’d believed him to be—my relentless, demanding, trustworthy, benevolent, and healing God.
A peace I hadn’t felt in months settled over my spirit as I entered our house again. Sam was still in the kitchen, exactly where I’d left him. A mother’s love and tenacity—the kind God had called me to before we’d even conceived Ryan—fueled my parting words.
“My God loves our son more than your work,” I said to Sam. “My God longs to see him healed and smiling again. My God hates that we’ve blamed our failures—our negligence—on him. My God tells me it’s time for us to leave, not because of this place but because of what we’ve sacrificed to it.”
Sam didn’t speak.
“I’ll pack my bags tonight. There are two beds in Sullivan’s suite, and … and I could use the space.”
I gathered my things from the dining room table. “God has called me to be Ryan’s mom,” I said as I walked past Sam on my way to our bedroom. “And we’re leaving in two days.”
Epilogue
THE SCENE WAS APOCALYPTIC. SLATE CLOUDS ROILED IN A stormy sky as furious gales heaved waves against a jagged cliff. A woman stood above the chaos, flowing garments shredded by the force of nature’s rage, hair plastered by the wind across her neck and brow.
She was luminous—as if a single, narrow shaft of brightness had pierced the chaos and alighted on her calm, uptilted face. Her eyes, hooded and serene, were turned toward the source. She stood with arms loose by her sides, her fragile frame arched forward by the wind rushing off the sea.
The colors and textures Aidan had used were stark—sharp and threatening and unyielding. He’d called his final painting Faith. I lay it in the grass on top of Aidan’s grave, then knelt and traced the contour of his name.
A hemorrhage had snuffed the future from his life two weeks after his surgery. But it hadn’t shortened it by much. Though the surgeon had removed the bulk of the tumor, some of it was inoperable, and Aidan knew his time was short.
It had taken a month, after our flight from Kathmandu, for me to log in to Facebook again. There were no messages from Aidan waiting there—as if he’d read into my silence all the words I couldn’t say.
With my hand flat against the stone that marked his curtailed life, I whispered, “Your mom made sure I got the painting.” I hadn’t intended to speak out loud, yet it seemed somehow fitting. “Thank you for leaving it to me.” I’d found a note attached with masking tape to the back of the canvas. Two words: i understand. They bound my guilt and soothed my pain.
I skimmed the details of his work. The ridges of raised paint. The power and depth of color. The nearly audible roar of wind and rain and waves. They hadn’t quieted yet—not in my life or Ryan’s. Perhaps they had in Sam’s, who’d assured me he’d return to the States so we could deal with our “disagreement”—his word still appalled me—when God told him it was time to leave his adopted land.
“I miss Nepal,” I admitted as I knelt by Aidan’s grave. I shook my head and laughed, and in my mind, he laughed too. Despite the turmoil that had stalked me in that place, its broken beauty had seeped its warmth into reluctant veins. I felt it pulsing still.
Ryan and I had flown out of Kathmandu together. Sam had come down to the ambulance bay with us for our departure, already dressed and packed for his next trek. He’d said his parting words to Ryan, told him he’d check in as often as he could. Then he’d looked at me and said nothing. There was no anger in his face. No accusation in his gaze. We’d talked so much already that there was nothing left to say. The chasm that yawned between his God and mine was an unbridgeable space.
He’d moved out of our house since then and gone to live among the people he had stayed to save. Independent, visa-free, and unconcerned. “God recruited me. He’ll keep me here,” he’d said in his last e-mail, his atypical compromise more proof of an irrational calling.
Sam’s storm still surged around me. My storm. The one I’d fed by hoping and not doing, by allowing without questioning, by caving in, by sinning. I was learning to own my mistakes. I was learning how to function in the remorse that ebbed and flowed like the battering waves of Aidan’s painting. And shame. I was learning to live with my shame too.
“We’re back in the States,” I said into Aidan’s absence. “Ryan’s doing okay, I guess. He’s in rehab, figuring out how to function without the use of his legs. But he was able to flex a muscle in his thigh a week ago, so … I guess we stay hopeful, right?”
I now lived in the unhurried South, in one of the bedrooms of Sullivan’s vast home, where Ryan would join us when he was released. She’d already made sure he’d have all the help he needed.
I pictured my son on his hospital bed, long bangs covering averted eyes. “He’s talking a bit more,” I said. “Not much … and it’s brutal when he does. I’m learning what I can undo and what I can’t. And he’s learning—I think he’s just learning how to be hopeful again.”
I propped the painting against Aidan’s gravestone, stood back, and felt a tearing at my soul. A profound, piercing, solemn pain. “I want you to keep this,” I whispered, tears again blurring my vision. “I know you left it for me, but … Aidan, it’s you. And you were never mine.”
Spent spirits hovered out of sight and reach. Releasing a slow breath, I squared my shoulders and closed my eyes. Then I turned, resolute, and walked toward a future I still could not predict and into a healing well beyond my tattered strength. Please, God, I breathed. Please.
I knew he heard.
A Note from the Author
THE PLIGHT OF MKS (MISSIONARIES’ KIDS) IS FAMILIAR TO me. As the daughter of missionaries to France, I benefited from the best a life in ministry has to offer. But I also suffered from some of the worst.
I am a fervent proponent of thoughtful missionary endeavors. I’ve seen them bring practical help and eternal hope to jaded First World metropoles and imperiled Third World tribes. It’s the unintentional toll of a more reckless zeal, measured in broken families and wounded children, that gives me pause.
In my twenty-five years of work with MKs, I’ve seen a majority of them flourish, their relationships, careers, and faith enriched by broad horizons and incomparable experiences. But I’ve seen others—broken, cynical, yearning Ryans—blame their abandonment and suffering on The Call.
My primary message, when I speak to churches, missions, and ministers around the world, is simple: Evangelistic endeavors have too often resulted in collateral injury to defenseless children, souls too young to distinguish between human failure and divine directives. We’ve got to do better.
My hope is that this novel will be a cautionary tale, shedding light on the plight of the MKs who struggle. And if it inspires parents to make wiser choices to defend the well-being of their families and their children, I’ll consider the effort—and the potential backlash—worth the cost.
For more on the topic of MKs, please visit www.michelephoenix.com.
Discussion Questions
1.What were early warning signs that Sam might be prone to an irrational pursuit of ministry?
2.Is there anything Lauren could have done to foster a healthier ministry/family balance early on?
3.Lauren talks about losing Ryan by “small concessions and false truths” over the course of his childhood. List the concessions and false truths you see in the story.
4.Did Lauren have any other option than to follow Sam’s calling to Nepal?
5.What are the factors in Lauren’s life that made it so easy for her to enter an online relationship with Aidan?
6.How do you think the story would have ended if Aidan hadn’t died?
7.Is there hope for Ryan and Lauren? Why do you think there is/isn’t?
8.How does the church’s naïveté about missionaries and their children potentially protect the kind of dysfunction the Coventry family experiences?
About the Author
JIM WHITMER
BORN IN FRANCE TO A CANADIAN FATHER and an American mother, Michèle Phoenix is a consultant, writer, and speaker with a heart for Third Culture Kids. She taught for twenty years at Black Forest Academy (Germany) before launching her own advocacy venture under Global Outreach Mission. Michèle travels globally to consult and teach on topics related to this unique people group. She loves good conversations, mischievous students, Marvel movies, and paths to healing.
Learn more at michelephoenix.com.
Twitter: @frenchphoenix
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Of Stillness and Storm Page 29
