The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, page 2
This lack of examination goes back to the beginning, to the Garden of Eden, I think. What if God had kept us in the Garden and talked with us about our flaws so we might not have remained so ignorant about them and thus so doomed to repeat them? What if, instead of casting us out, he’d gathered us in to figure out the why of our mistakes—the who, what, where, and when? Throwing us out of the Garden. It never made much sense to me. I suspect that’s why Jesus made so much sense to so many people. He invited people back into the Garden, through holes in the roof, through moments at a well, through loaves of bread and baskets of fish. As a therapist, I wanted to be part of inviting people back into the Garden for a good conversation about what went wrong in their story.
But I’d never felt the lump toward myself before, and it was disconcerting. In it, I could feel an unfamiliar longing to be seen, to be known. However, I liked to think of myself as a “private person.” Not evasive. Not scared. Just . . . private. I’d worn that word with pride. Then, Rebecca. And Geppetto. And the image of a hard shell hiding a missing limb. All week it had been difficult to look in the mirror without seeing a turtle staring back.
Eighteen hours after I’d absconded from the supermarket with a ten-pack of Oscar Mayer wieners, I sat on my patio on another fall Friday afternoon, though this one had more winter than summer in it. The sky was an overcast gray, the canopy of the maple next to the patio more sparse, the patio itself covered completely with leaves that had already fallen. A wind from the north made fifty degrees feel like forty.
Sitting in the dirty white chair, I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. I’d forgone a hot dog in the hopes of taking Rebecca to lunch if she appeared, and my stomach was beginning to rumble. I checked my watch. One o’clock. Thirty minutes later than last week. I felt a tug of disappointment. I felt a tug of relief. I noted the disappointment was the stronger of the two tugs, and the lump returned to my throat. I stood and stepped toward the sliding doors but stopped short when I heard a rustle of leaves along the side of the house. I turned around. And there she was, standing beneath the maple.
“Hi,” I said, with poorly pretended nonchalance.
She just stood there, doing that thing again with those hazel eyes of hers, looking me over, taking inventory. Her smile said she knew I’d been waiting for her, and that she knew I knew she knew, and that we didn’t have to talk about it. The gifts just kept on coming.
“Want to get some lunch?” we asked simultaneously.
“Jinx!” we shouted at the same time, followed by synchronous laughter. I suppose if you’re not becoming like kids again as you fall in love, you’re probably falling into something other than love.
“I’m buying,” I said quickly, trying to avoid another jinx.
“You’re on, Campbell. I’m dying for a Big Mac.”
I breathed an inner sigh of relief. McDonald’s was relatively cheap, and my student loan money had been dwindling quickly.
She shivered. I walked toward her, shedding my coat and throwing it around her. She pulled it close, saying, “I don’t usually go for such chivalry, but thank you. This weather caught me off guard. Do you need to get another coat for yourself?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” I replied, trying to sound casual.
I wasn’t fine. I was freezing. However, I didn’t have another coat.
“All right,” she said, taking me at my word and turning with her arm crooked so I could link mine through it. “Shall we?”
Thankfully, the nearest McDonald’s was just a few breezy blocks away. I learned along the way that she’d gotten the egret tattoo because it was the city symbol of Seaside, Maryland, the beach town where her parents lived. I told her tattoos were counterintuitive to me—there’s enough pain in life without seeking out more of it voluntarily. She told me that was part of what she loved about tattoos—they hurt while they’re happening, but you love them in the long run, and she was planning to turn as much hurt as possible into something that could be loved in the long run.
I thought of her turtle and the lump returned.
We supersized our meals and chose a table where the cloudy residue of someone’s halfhearted swipes at sanitizing could still be seen. By the time she’d polished off her Big Mac, Rebecca knew I was an only child, and I knew she had two younger sisters, who she adored. I knew she loved her mother without caveat, but she was without question a daddy’s girl, even though I could already sense she’d bristle at the label. Her father was an attorney. Mine had been a lawyer, too, before his death. I was relieved at finding some common ground again.
The conversation was clipping along nicely until I saw him.
He sat alone at a table for two, directly facing me over Rebecca’s shoulder. He was probably forty years old and wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a bland brown tie. It was poorly knotted and sagged away from the collar, not intentionally but obliviously. A head of strawberry-red hair about a month past due for a cut was overly combed to the side and slicked down in a way meant to blend him into the world, but it advertised effort and had the opposite effect. A weak chin beneath thin lips that were topped by a scraggly mustache. A face so boyish it would never be respected in any setting requiring him to wear a tie. Big, gentle, puddly eyes, creased by sadness at the corners and framed by glasses left over from a previous generation. He ate french fries one at a time and stared straight ahead. Straight at me, actually, but really through me. The kind of stare that is always looking into a past it can’t seem to escape.
The lump in my throat was so big I could barely breathe, let alone eat.
I tried to bring my attention back to what Rebecca was saying. Apparently her father was not just an attorney but a very successful one. The kind of success that allows you to buy one of those houses at the shore that tourists drive by every summer, gawking, wondering what those people do for a living, assuming it must be something exceedingly evil. His vocation was the opposite of evil. He was in environmental law and sued really wealthy companies for doing really terrible things to the planet. The Earth had thanked him for his service by rewarding him with one of its finer views.
“Eli? Are you okay?” I got the feeling she’d asked me a question to which I hadn’t responded. She sounded worried.
“Yeah,” I said, bringing my attention fully back to her. “It’s just this guy over there. He’s . . . I don’t know, there’s something about him. It’s sort of messing me up.”
She responded to the huskiness in my voice by briefly placing her hand over mine. Then she brushed a napkin to the floor, bending over casually to retrieve it while turning her head slightly to see the man. By the time our eyes met again, there was understanding in hers.
“Oh my goodness, Eli, he’s so lonely looking.”
At the word lonely, something in me unraveled, something that had been wound up tight for a very long time, wound so tight I hadn’t consciously known it was there, though the lump in my throat had probably known it all along.
Rebecca was asking again if I was okay. I sort of heard her and sort of didn’t as I got up and walked to the table where he sat. I exchanged words with him, the puddles in his eyes growing a little larger, different creases appearing at the corners of them as his lips formed a rusty little smile. I wished him a good day and turned back to our table, where Rebecca was watching me, her mouth slightly ajar.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking my seat again. Her mouth was still ajar. I felt prickly hot with self-consciousness again. “That was rude of me to leave you sitting here like that.” Still ajar. The forehead sheen was about to make its return. “I don’t know what came over me. I hope you can forgive me.”
Her teeth clicked together as she closed her mouth. “What did you say to him?”
“Well, I, the guy, you know, you said it, he’s lonely, it’s oozing from his pores. I just wanted to let him know he’d been seen by somebody.” I corrected myself. “I guess I needed to let him know that. So I apologized for interrupting his lunch and told him he has the kind of eyes that make the world feel like a safer place to me.”
I was too embarrassed to look her in the eye, so I looked past her once again at the man who was still staring off into the distance. The stare looked different to me now, though. It seemed possible his past was forgotten for a moment. It seemed possible he was staring into his future.
Rebecca was silent. I forced myself to return my gaze to her face, cringing slightly at what I might find there. What I found was a trail of tears running down each of her cheeks. She looked at me that way for a long time. It didn’t make me uncomfortable though. In fact, I was feeling something exceptionally pleasant, something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope disentangled from fear.
It seemed possible that Rebecca Miller, too, was staring into her future, and I was a part of it.
3
REBECCA AND I NEVER REALLY made anything official. One week she was putting her leg in my lap, the next we were eating at McDonald’s, and by the following week I was having a hard time focusing on much of anything else. The rest of that autumn was a blur, the kind of blur you must see when you’re falling from a high cliff into the ocean below. Rebecca was my ocean and I was falling fast. Everything else was just the world I happened to be falling through.
By the time winter break rolled around, going our separate directions already felt unnatural. Nevertheless, she planned to return to Maryland for the holidays, and I had no plans at all. I’d considered returning to Bradford’s Ferry for a day or two. There would be old friends gathering at the Draughty Den—a cozy, dimly lit pub on Main Street—including my best childhood friend, Benjamin, a burgeoning literary agent. Everyone would be sipping beer, watching the snow fall past wreaths hanging from the streetlamps outside, retelling old stories. But that reward just wasn’t worth the investment to me: the long bus ride home, the stilted conversations with my mother, the otherwise deafening silence of my childhood home, the long bus ride back. Rebecca left campus the Friday before Christmas.
She was very nearly killed three days later, on the shortest day of the year.
The phone call from her mother woke me up just before noon. Rebecca had been driving home shortly after midnight, returning from a night out with old friends. She was sober. The other driver was not. She glanced left, saw his failure to slow down for his red light, and tried to hit the brakes. A rare Maryland dusting of snow on untreated roads added up to a slippery surface. She skidded into the intersection, and he collided with her side of the car at thirty-five miles an hour. By the time she awoke eight hours later, the doctors were describing her survival as a miracle, side-impact airbag or not. She had some minor cuts, some bad bruises, and two cracked ribs, but the worst of it was a severe concussion. Upon waking, she’d asked her mother to call me. It was the first they were hearing of me. She’d planned to tell them about me on Christmas morning.
I asked Mrs. Miller if I could come see Rebecca. I heard some hesitation in her yes but pretended I didn’t. I threw some clothes in a bag, purchased a ticket for the earliest train out of Philadelphia, and was in Seaside, Maryland, by dinnertime. I met her parents in the hospital waiting room. I was unshaven and pretty sure I hadn’t brushed my teeth on the way out the door, but of course they weren’t really focused on me.
Rebecca was heavily sedated, buying time for her brain to recover from the closed head injury. However, she was conscious enough for the corners of her lips to curl upward on seeing me, and for a tear to roll down her cheek when visiting hours for everyone but family were over. I took that tear to mean she wished I was family. I wished I was too.
Over the next several days, I found myself in a strange situation: I was living in the home of people who barely knew me, wanting nothing more than to care for their daughter but knowing my name fell way below theirs on the list of candidates for primary caregiver. So I made myself useful by offering to pick up the slack in their home instead. They cautiously accepted my offer. I bought groceries. I waited at the house to sign for some last-minute FedEx Christmas shipments. I even wrapped a pile of presents.
By the time Rebecca was released from the hospital on Christmas morning, I’d been gladly added to the Miller guest list for the rest of our winter break. They were courteous enough to ask if my mother might be offended by me spending the holiday with another family. I told them my mother was perfectly pleased by the size of her holiday gathering. It was true. It was also true she spent the holiday completely alone.
Their home was beautiful, but the beauty of those two weeks went far deeper than tasteful decor, warm lighting, and ocean sunrises filtering through my bedroom blinds. It was beautiful for its lack of pretense, for the sincere affection shown among the Millers, for how different they were from each other and how much they celebrated those differences, for the sense that nothing was being withheld. By the time the break was over, I was reluctant to leave.
In the days before we departed, Rebecca’s father offered to buy her a new car. She declined for the same reason she’d made her way home from Italy on her own: she liked to know she was strong enough to stand on her own two feet. So she rented a car instead, and we drove back to Philadelphia.
The next day, before we returned the rental, I went car shopping with her. Rebecca had only enough money to look at used car lots. I suggested that together we had enough money to split the cost of a new car in a responsible price range. She mulled it over for about two seconds and agreed. Our first purchase together was a Ford, but I think it was more than a car—it was Rebecca’s acknowledgment that I’d become a part of her independence, not a threat to it.
For Rebecca, the purchase tapped out her automotive budget for the rest of the academic year. For me, it tapped out my entire savings. I didn’t tell her that, though. There were credit cards for situations like these. Also, I didn’t feel like I’d just spent thousands of dollars I couldn’t afford. I felt like I’d just found my calling, and it was priceless: I was going to give Rebecca Miller the life she deserved.
The following Christmas, I used a credit card to purchase Rebecca’s engagement ring. At the time, the debt didn’t bother me, because over the previous year credit cards had become both a necessity and a habit of mine. I just kept telling myself that only a few years and a couple of doctoral degrees stood between us and financial freedom.
However, it did bother me a little more the year after that, when in January we were married along the ocean in the Millers’ backyard. It bothered me because our marriage meant we would soon mingle our finances and start paying bills from a joint account; therefore, in a way, she was about to pay for half of her own engagement ring.
It was a shameful thought, in direct contradiction to the purpose I’d identified for my life. So I ignored it, just as I’d ignored the hesitation in her mother’s voice when she’d agreed I could join them at Rebecca’s bedside. In other words, at first I knew it was there, but I simply looked the other way until I eventually forgot it had been there at all. I’d gotten so good at keeping secrets, I could even keep them from myself.
Our honeymoon was a humble one, much like our car, and for much the same reason. Mr. Miller—he’d asked me to call him “Dad,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do so, for reasons I didn’t understand—had offered to send us somewhere sunny and sandy, but Rebecca had again insisted we pay for it ourselves. So we spent a long weekend in the wine country of upper New York State. Peak tourism in the region is late summer and early fall. By January, hotel rates are rock bottom, and the wineries are so glad to see you they become very generous with their free pours. Beyond the occasional wine tasting, there wasn’t much to do that weekend. That was fine with us. We weren’t terribly motivated to leave our hotel room.
Which is probably why Rebecca found my journal.
I’d been journaling daily since our first date at McDonald’s, but until Rebecca discovered the journal, there wasn’t another soul in the world who knew about it. I was in the shower and she was bored, rooting through the stack of books I’d shoved into our suitcase, when she came across something smaller and leather bound. You can’t really blame her for opening it, though I tried to when I walked out of the foggy bathroom and saw her holding it. She brushed aside my anger like you’d brush away a gnat distracting you from a glorious sunset. She was in awe, which really is the best reaction you can hope for when someone sees you turned inside out.
Holding it up, she delivered my first review. “Eli, this is exquisite. It’s like you’re speaking to all the clients you’ve worked with. It’s like . . .” She left from behind her eyes and traveled backward through time, then returned. “ . . . it’s like you’re speaking to that man at McDonald’s again. It’s like God is speaking through you to all of us, letting us know we matter to him, no matter how overlooked or ashamed we might feel. Where . . . where did this come from?”
It came from the voices within me, which had grown more graceful since I met Rebecca.
As a kid, the God who’d spoken to me through my church had been distant, disappointed, and dangerous. He hung out up in the heavens somewhere, mostly out of reach, and was more like Santa than like Jesus, keeping a list and checking it twice. You always seemed to come out naughty in his final tally, and he seemed a little trigger happy about casting you into hell for eternity. I’d watched my parents in the pews, nodding at all of it, as if it made complete sense to them, as if a love like that was one in which they could gladly participate. I’d figured it explained a lot about my parents and decided I wanted nothing to do with any of it. So when I’d gone off to the University of Illinois and met a bunch of atheists who were mostly happy, kind, and good, I tried to be one of them. No matter how hard I tried, though, I just couldn’t get rid of my parents’ God. However, he no longer felt so distant—rather, he lived on in the form of a disappointed and dangerous voice within me.
