The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, page 3
Then another voice had entered my life: Rebecca.
It seemed clear to me that any God worth believing in must look on me with at least as much affection as she did. So I decided to believe in that kind of God by listening for a more loving voice and, gradually, in our first year together, I’d begun to hear it everywhere. I heard it in Rebecca, in the books I was reading, in the wind through the top of that big maple in the back of my duplex. Eventually, I even began to hear it within me—a still, small voice, whispering of my worthiness and the worthiness of all things. I’d begun to record what I was hearing in a journal, and I’d told no one about it. In that honeymoon hotel room, Rebecca told me I needed to tell everyone about it.
Everybody in my life had always underestimated me; Rebecca always rounded up.
4
GROWING UP IN BRADFORD’S FERRY, every child spent the first month of summer break looking forward to Independence Day and the town’s annual River Days Festival. For one glorious week there was a pancake breakfast every morning in a park, boat races, outdoor concerts, an art contest, a parade, fireworks of course, and a carnival. Each year I anticipated the return of some of my favorite rides, but my favorite ride of all was the Scrambler. It didn’t lift you into the air; it flung you through the air, along the ground, the world blurring around you until you reached the apex of your orbit, where you’d pause briefly, the world snapping into focus, before being flung through the blur in the other direction. Then you’d get another moment of focus, and so on. Blur and focus, blur and focus.
The first decade of our marriage was a blur, with moments here and there that came into focus.
The morning after we returned from our honeymoon, I sat down at my computer in the modest apartment we’d rented off campus, searched Yahoo for how to join the blogging craze, set up a WordPress website, and published the first of more than five hundred entries from my journals. I called them “reflections” and was certain they wouldn’t attract any kind of digital spotlight. Rebecca, on the other hand, insisted on calling them “inspirations” and predicted they would strike a chord in the blogosphere. It turns out she was right to round up about my writings. They went viral, over and over again. The ride was underway.
That first year of blogging was all blur.
Then, almost a year to the day after we returned from our honeymoon, Sarah arrived. The ride reached an apex and the world came into crystal-clear focus. Rebecca in labor for forty-eight hours, pushing for the last twelve, exhausted and scared but fighting to bring our little girl into the world. My first glimpse of Sarah’s bald head. Her first howl. The rubbery resistance of her umbilical cord against scissors. The look on Rebecca’s face when she first took Sarah into her arms, the look you might give your beloved on their return from a long journey.
Sarah’s first year of life was more blur. My online platform was expanding exponentially, and one of my readers was an editor at a major publishing house. She reached out to me, asking if I had an agent. I said yes. It was almost true. By then, Benjamin had established himself as an influential literary agent, so I asked him if he’d like to represent me with the publishing house. We pinched ourselves—a couple kids from Bradford’s Ferry publishing books together!—and within a month I had my first book contract. The first half of my advance arrived a week before our second anniversary. Theoretically, I put it in the bank. Actually, I put it toward credit card debt.
A week later, I had my first panic attack.
I was already stretched exceedingly thin by my various responsibilities: coursework, clinical training, dissertation research, figuring out how to be a husband and father, and writing my first book. So when it came time to travel the country to interview for our clinical residencies—the final hurdle before receiving our doctorates—it was the straw that broke Geppetto’s shell, if you will. I’d been reading about panic attacks in my textbooks, but you can’t really comprehend them until you’ve had one. Heart hammering wildly, sweating like a midsummer heat wave, certain you’re on the verge of dying. I was afraid Rebecca would see me at my weakest and lose all faith in me.
Instead, she showed more.
She said the second half of my advance would be enough to get us through the next year. She said no marriage needs two doctors in it anyway. She said I’d be an amazing work-from-home father. She said I should drop out of graduate school and finish my book. She beamed as she said it. I momentarily considered correcting her assumptions about the advance—which I’d mostly already spent—but I didn’t. I wanted to become the man she was imagining as her smile stretched from ear to ear. So I stayed quiet. I let the truth float briefly at the edge of my awareness, until it drifted away. And I became a full-time writer.
Most of what came after was especially blurry, though once in a while life would come into focus long enough for me to really see it.
For instance, the morning Rebecca found out her clinical residency would be in Chicago, just a couple hours east of Bradford’s Ferry. The day we moved into a second-story flat in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of the city, within walking distance of the hospital where Rebecca would be a resident for a year. Later that day, when newly-walking Sarah tripped and skinned her knee on a sidewalk and reached for me instead of Rebecca.
The release of my first book—The Whisper in the Wind—about listening for the voice of God within us. The early sales reports suggesting it wouldn’t be bothering any bestseller lists, but it would probably earn out its advance and eventually produce a little more income for our family.
Rebecca’s graduation from UPenn. Her interview for her dream job in a western suburb of Chicago: a low-paying, full-time therapist position at a nonprofit community mental health center. The conversation about whether my writing career could compensate for her meager salary. My continued clarity of purpose: to give Rebecca Miller the life she deserved. Rebecca’s butterflies upon leaving for her first day of work. Her joy upon returning.
A contract for a second book—A Manifesto for Marriage—about how the Beatitudes might shape our vision for marriage. Rebecca’s mother teasing me about the temerity of writing such a book only four years into my own marriage. Benjamin telling me about the size of the advance, bigger than the first but not big enough to solve some monetary problems that were growing faster than their solutions. The week it was released and flirted with some bestseller lists. Finding out it would remain only a flirtation.
The afternoon Benjamin called to tell me Manifesto had sold well enough that my publisher had invited a third book proposal, blending the genres of my first two books. The week of our seventh wedding anniversary and Sarah’s sixth birthday coinciding with the publication of The Contemplative Couple. A big party celebrating all three milestones. Sarah standing on her chair at the dining room table, blowing a kazoo, singing the praises of my new book, “The Competitive Couple.”
Benjamin telling me the community forming around my books was beginning to see me as a guru of sorts, and my publisher wanted to capitalize on it. The word guru feeling like a very hot spotlight. Telling him I didn’t understand why people thought I had it all figured out. Telling him I didn’t write because I’d “arrived,” I wrote because I was still struggling toward the place where all my readers were also hoping to arrive. Benjamin telling me to get over it because I had an offer for a fourth book, a sequel of sorts to my first one—working title: The Voice in the Void.
Sarah falling from a playground slide and breaking her wrist. Several weeks later, breaking my own wrist playing basketball at the gym. Typing with only one hand. Opening the hospital bills for both fractured appendages. Kicking myself for telling Rebecca to choose a high deductible plan. Stuffing the bills in a drawer and trying to focus on my manuscript.
On that Scrambler in Bradford’s Ferry, it was blur and focus, blur and focus, until suddenly you sensed the ride was slowing down, and your time was up. It had never occurred to me the same thing could happen to my life. To my faith. To the words within me. To the purpose that had guided me. It had never occurred to me that my ride with Rebecca might come to an end.
It didn’t occur to me until, on an otherwise ordinary Friday morning in August—just a few months short of our tenth anniversary—I was awakened by some rustling in our closet.
5
THE DAY BEFORE REBECCA LEFT ME began like any other, with one exception. There was an unnecessary rapidity in her morning routine, as if she couldn’t get out the door soon enough.
It was a Thursday morning, and my cruise control was set to the speed we’d gradually established over Sarah’s nine years of life. Wake up. Lie there. Grab for a phone and check email. Get up. Start the coffee. Stand and wait for it while checking the news. Wake Sarah and walk with her through her morning ritual: get dressed, get breakfast, banter, brush teeth, pack her lunchbox, pack her bookbag, kisses all around as my ladies rush out the door for work and school five minutes later than planned. All of it had a well-worn rhythm to it. A cadence. A pace.
Rebecca’s pace was off.
She didn’t stand by the coffeemaker with me, trading news stories. She went right from waking to the shower. She poured her coffee into a travel mug rather than the ceramic mug that I’d already prepared for her with cream and sugar. She ate a banana standing at the counter rather than a bowl of cereal at the table. It wasn’t until I went to the fridge to prepare Sarah’s lunch and discovered Rebecca had already packed it that I realized how eager she was to get out the door.
I watched her more closely as she quickly finished checking Sarah’s bookbag for folders and homework, a pit threatening to form in my stomach. There was an urgency and an absence to her. Even as she gave Sarah’s hair one final brushing she was, for all intents and purposes, already out the door. Sarah kissed me on the cheek as she said goodbye, but Rebecca didn’t, and they left for work and school five minutes early.
Rebecca, it seemed, had finally run out of patience.
“So, how close are you?”
Benjamin’s smile was warm and relaxed, but I’d known him long enough to know it was a reflection not of what he felt but of what he wanted me to feel. Behind that smile was the understandable tension of a literary agent whose client was already six months past the deadline for delivering a first draft of his next book. I heard the tension not so much in what he said but in how quickly he said it. No catching up about our kids first. No reminiscing about old times in Bradford’s Ferry. No sports talk. It was August, and the Cubs held the best record in baseball after having swept the Marlins at Wrigley. Benjamin didn’t even mention it. My old friend was wound tight.
I reflexively mirrored the warmth of his smile. “B, it’s almost there. I’m about to let Rebecca read it, and she’s going to weep.” I made a lame joke about buying stock in Kleenex. “I’m sure she’ll have a few suggestions, though. I’ll make a couple of tweaks and then it will be good to go. It’s close. Really close.”
Despite his best effort, Benjamin’s smile cooled a degree or two. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it.
“Eli, I’d be happy to take a look at it too, if that would be helpful. In fact, Jill is so eager to get something on her desk, I’m sure she’d be happy to take a look at it right now, even if it’s a little rougher than usual. Get the ball rolling on editorial ideas, you know?”
It was a nice offer, but embedded in it was the subtle suggestion that one of the most patient editors on the planet was beginning to lose her patience.
“That’s really nice of you both.” I played it off as if I hadn’t noticed any pressure in the offer of support. “You know me, though. Rebecca has been my first reader for every blog post and book manuscript since she found that journal of mine on our honeymoon, and I’m superstitious. It would be bad luck to change things up now.”
His smile cooled more noticeably, and he sat back, glancing around the Starbucks. Located on Michigan Avenue directly across from Millennium Park, it had become one of our preferred rendezvous spots during Rebecca’s residency. I still enjoyed meeting him there in the anonymity of the city, where there weren’t enough spotlights to go around. I gazed over his shoulder and out the window. The reflective gleam of the famous Bean could be glimpsed through the dense summertime foliage of the tree-lined park.
He leaned in again. “Eli, Jill told me in confidence that if she doesn’t have a complete manuscript on her desk by Labor Day, the publisher is going to cancel your contract and recoup the first half of the advance.”
I responded so confidently and calmly that even I believed it. “B, I’ve got this. Have I ever let you down?”
He sighed. “When have you ever let anybody down, Eli? But there’s a first time for everything, especially ordinary things, like disappointing people.”
“Now there’s a book title for you: There’s a First Time for Every Ordinary Thing. When are you finally going to join us pathetic scribes and write a book of your own?” I asked jovially.
With that, I steered the conversation toward more comfortable topics, like raising daughters, warming oceans, the demise of the Western church. Benjamin was unable to resist. An hour quickly passed before he had to leave for his next meeting. As we walked out of the Starbucks into the kind of liquid heat you can only find in two places—the equator and Chicago in August—we exchanged a hug, patting each other’s back the way men do, inserting just a hint of aggression into the intimacy. This time, though, it seemed Benjamin’s pats were on the verge of becoming smacks.
We were turning to go our separate ways when I said, “Hey, how about those Cubs.” Half question, half statement, a whole invitation to end our meeting on a lighter note.
Benjamin paused. Then that smile again, too warm and too relaxed. “Just make sure you have it to us by the end of the month, Eli.”
He turned and walked away, as rapidly as Rebecca had walked out the door that morning.
Just hours after meeting with Benjamin, my therapist’s patience seemed to be failing too.
I’d begun meeting with Jeff six months earlier, the week of my manuscript deadline. I’d left everyone with the impression I would meet the deadline, but I knew I couldn’t, and one morning while I was alone at home my heart started slamming, the room started spinning, and I lost the ability to breathe. My first panic attack since the one that had turned me into a career author.
That evening, when Rebecca arrived home, I explained to her casually that this next book was going to be a huge success, and success attracts critics, and I needed to get better at handling the haters. So could she recommend a good therapist?
She studied me with those hazel eyes of hers—the way she’d once done under a big maple on a broken patio in Pennsylvania—though there was none of the old affection in her attention. She’d been asking me to go to couples counseling for a year. I’d always found an excuse to delay it. And here I was, wanting to talk to someone without her. I named her frustration before she could show it and reassured her I’d keep her in the loop about my conversations with my counselor. The offer softened her, and she recommended a colleague of a colleague.
I’d met with Jeff for the first time on a Thursday afternoon. Within the first few minutes of our first session, I experienced firsthand what we’d been taught at UPenn about therapeutic ambivalence. Our clinical director’s favorite adage was, “Remember, no matter what your clients say, they are deeply ambivalent about being in therapy.” Most clients simply want to patch their old life back together. They want to return to the best of what has been, not go on to discover the rest of what might be, because deep down they know that real change costs something. An old identity might have to die so a new one can grow up in its place. Cherished relationships might have to be relinquished. Life callings may be called into question.
Growth sounds great, in theory. In reality it’s often a bloodbath.
Jeff and I had met almost every Thursday afternoon for six months. I’d been ambivalent about attending every session, but he had been unfailingly patient with me. However, in the same way I could feel the tension in Benjamin’s back slaps, I could hear a seriousness in Jeff’s voice I’d never heard before.
“Do you want to know my secret to being a decent therapist, Elijah?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “I can practically smell the emotions coming off people. Happiness has a scent. So does sadness. Anxiety. Anger. Peacefulness. They each have their own scent. It’s not something I have to think about. I just sense it. Then instead of talking about what my clients want to discuss, I invite them to talk about the aroma that fills the room.” He paused, looking at me with an expression of the same tender seriousness that was in his voice. “But you, Elijah, you are odorless. Six months into therapy, and I’ve barely caught a whiff of you.”
I felt like I’d been slapped as kindly as possible. I didn’t know what to say. So, I summoned the smile that had saved me on so many occasions, and I made a joke. I told him I’d create some odor by eating beans before our next session.
Jeff was an impeccable listener, but he continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “I really care about you, Elijah. I like who you are and I love who you might become. So I’m going to be more transparent with you than I usually am with my clients. Before we began today, I decided this would either be our first real session or our final fake one.”
He allowed some space for his words to sink in. I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it. I ignored the knot in my stomach.
“So,” he continued, “are you ready to start talking about what matters? Are you ready to talk about why six months ago, at our first appointment, you admitted to me that you were stressed about your book deadline and now—six months beyond that very same deadline—it doesn’t seem to be bothering you at all? Are you ready to talk about why you and Rebecca have quit going out on your monthly dates? Are you ready to talk about the circles that keep getting darker under your eyes? Are you ready to start talking about the burdens you’re carrying?”
