The Sky Beneath My Feet, page 15
“It’s for a book club,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I decided to skip it. I just couldn’t get through the thing. You know how it is.”
Now my cheeks feel hot. It’s like the Jesus fish all over.
She sets the book down. “It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to read anything for enjoyment.”
“They keep you busy in school,” I say, wishing it had been a Smart Girls book on the counter. Why’d it have to be a Bodice Ripper?
“So, the reason I came . . . the thing is, your sudden exit really stirred things up. We had a good discussion after that, a lot of us. I guess you could say that I was deputized, though I did volunteer. Everybody wants to, like, apologize.”
“Apologize for what?”
“I think you know. We kind of turned on you all the sudden. I feel kind of ashamed.”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“I do. And I apologize. You were going out on a limb even showing up, and we pretty much hacked the limb off. Chas was really bummed out. He would’ve come himself, but I thought it would be weird if a whole bunch of us showed up unannounced.”
“Well . . . apology accepted. Thank you.”
“There’s more.”
“I don’t think I can take any more.”
“We would like it if you would consider coming to D.C. with us. So we can make it up to you.”
“The big demo? I don’t know, Marlene—”
“Don’t say no. Just think about it. You have no idea how much fun it will be. All those people together in one place, letting our voices be heard. It’s liberating. Really. It’s better than a concert even. And it’s peace, Beth. It’s not abortion or gay marriage or anything that might get you in trouble.” She grins over her mug at me. “Everybody wants peace.”
You’d be surprised, I think. I’ll bet Peggy Ensign doesn’t. Of course, last time we met, Marlene thought everybody was prochoice too. It’s surprising how much we can know, and still not know the world as it really is.
Eli comes in through the back door, carrying his new messenger bag. He stops in his tracks, looking at Marlene. Then he smiles. “You’re not the same girl.”
“This is Marlene,” I say.
“Nice to meet you. I thought for a minute you were the junkie from the other day.”
“The what?”
“It’s an inside joke,” I say. “Eli, have you eaten?”
He’s already heading for the stairs. “Over at Damon’s.”
“My son,” I explain. “He just turned sixteen. You were in the youth group with my other son, Jed.”
“I remember. He’s really tall.”
“He’s grown a lot since then.”
As if on cue, Jed appears. He recognizes her at once, despite the facial jewelry and the hair. If anything, these changes make her more fascinating to him. He stands there, staring, answering my motherly questions in monosyllables. Marlene notices the attention and glances away bashfully. They are nothing like the couple on the book cover lying faceup between them, but I can’t help seeing the similarities.
Oh, Jed.
“I was just telling your mom about this demo in D.C., trying to get her to come. A whole bunch of us are going down for it. You should too.”
Jed clears his throat. “Okay. Sounds great.”
“Awesome,” she says, glancing away again.
My turn to interrupt. “You know, I haven’t said I’m going.”
“Mom,” he says, managing to pack so much into the word. I’m embarrassing him just by being here, and betraying him by not going along with the plan.
Unlike Eli, Jed won’t clear out. He lingers silently, which pretty much kills the conversation. Suddenly the age gap between Marlene and me seems a mile wide. She finishes her tea and apologizes again and practically begs me not to back out of the D.C. trip. Jed burns holes in me with his laser beam eyes as she makes the final appeal.
“I guess I’d better get going,” she says.
“Let me write my number down, in case you want to call.” I jot my mobile number down on a pad, then get her to write down hers. Then I walk her to the door, Jed following a few steps behind.
After she’s gone, I turn to confront him.
“Now, don’t get any ideas, my boy.”
“Ideas about what?”
He doesn’t stick around for an answer. Now that Marlene’s gone, there’s nothing to interest him downstairs. I return to the kitchen to clean up. I switch on my phone, now that I have an excuse to give Holly. When I reach for the pad to program Marlene’s number in, the page is missing, ripped out, the perforated leftovers sticking out of the coiled wire.
“Oh, Jed.”
After microwaving the last of my tea, I take the mug out back. Sitting in one of the outdoor chairs, I gaze up at the sky overhead, a soft throw somebody from church gave Rick for Christmas a few years ago around my shoulders. The moon and stars are hidden behind thick clouds, bringing heaven closer to earth, almost to the treetops, or so it seems from my seated position. As I watch, the cloud cover shifts. The wind pushes it gently from left to right. It’s easy, watching this movement, to imagine the earth spinning, to imagine myself perched on the uppermost curve of the world. Some ancient, experiencing it the same way, would have mistaken this for a spiritual experience. I wonder sometimes how much of our understanding is based on what amounts to optical illusions.
The shed is dark tonight. What is Rick doing in there? I try to imagine and find that I can’t. As near as the structure is, it seems more distant to me than the clouds above. Rick feels less present somehow. I no longer sense him out here the way I did at the beginning of his exile.
That’s progress of a sort.
I could feel him everywhere once, during the first weeks after we met. I was a senior in college, pre-law, excellent grades, already on track for my stellar career. My parents loved the idea of a lawyer daughter, and I loved the thought that I could help people. Already I’d interned at a firm that did lots of pro bono work. One of the partners had even told me I had an affinity for the law.
All of that ambition turned fuzzy when I met Rick. It slipped into the region of memory where the distant past is stored. I spent all my time with him, and when I wasn’t with him, I was thinking about him. He had a way of filling my life, always present. I could almost talk to him in my head.
I was lovesick, in other words, and he felt the same way about me.
My friends thought I was crazy. His thought the same about him. They told themselves it wouldn’t last, that if it went on much longer they would have to intervene. So we dropped them, which left more time for each other. Time we put to use the way young couples obsessed with one another do.
The reality check arrived in the form of a plus sign on the pregnancy test. That’s how I told him, by showing him the stick. He didn’t take it the way I expected.
“I think this is a sign,” he said. “It confirms what I’ve felt all along.”
The sign said we should be together. The sign also said we should elope.
I graduated with honors, with a wedding ring (which I wore on a chain around my neck, since we hadn’t told my parents yet) and with an eight-week-old Jed growing inside me, concealed under the flowing cap and gown.
For a long time after that, we were happy. I never felt like I’d given up my life in favor of Rick’s. I never felt like the ministry thing was his career; I felt like we were doing it together, side by side. When we had Eli, we were thrilled. The first years at The Community were wonderful too. It was later that things started to change. After the church grew so large that most of the people there became strangers. After Rick accepted the job title that started to alienate him from himself.
He didn’t understand any better than I did what a Men’s Pastor was meant to do, but he was determined to be a great one. He had to take up golf, learn racquetball and handball. He had to follow sports in general much more than he’d ever done in the past. All the theology books from school went into boxes, replaced by the leadership handbooks, the best-selling self-help books, the guides to masculinity written by men who could only access the concept via cliché.
Ten years ago, even five years ago, Jim Shaw’s instinct about Rick would have been right. He did have a voice that mattered. He did have something important to say. But the last few years have changed him, hollowed him out. Is it any wonder he feels less present to me, when he’s hardly present to himself?
I’m not sure how much of this Rick could admit to. In the old days, I’d form a judgment on something only to find, when I shared it, that Rick saw things the same way. Now, not so much. He’s trying so hard to live up to expectations that he can’t admit to himself those expectations aren’t worth living up to.
Of course, it’s always possible I’m the one who’s wrong. Not everyone sees him the way I do. Clearly, Deedee has a different take.
These offerings of hers really puzzle me.
For a woman who’s lived her life alone, who has devoted herself to painting rather than a man, Rick’s actions must look so different. What looks to me like a deadbeat, she interpreted right from the start as some kind of hermit saint. Why was she so quick to idolize him?
Does she see something of herself in him?
Or perhaps it’s just the opposite. She sees something in him that is completely different, something utterly inaccessible to her imagination. A challenge.
You don’t leave flowers for yourself, after all.
You don’t appoint yourself to be your muse.
“You know what it is, Ricky boy. She admires you. Whatever she thinks you’re doing, it’s something she wishes she could do herself. But what that is, I don’t have a clue.”
I gaze at the shed, waiting for a reply. Nothing comes.
The last time I was outside enjoying the night, Gregory was walking with me. It’s hard to remember the details of that walk—all the intervening drama has blurred them—but there was one thing he said that seemed important. How did he put it? “Maybe this isn’t Rick’s time”—it was something like that. Maybe this wasn’t Rick’s time, it was mine.
What would my time even look like? A bus ride to our nation’s capital with a bunch of fruit loops and an infatuated son? A road trip down to Florida, maybe in a rented convertible, the wind whipping in my hair? Or something else entirely? Something I can’t even begin to imagine?
I take my mug inside, pausing at the door.
“Good night, Rick.”
A little wind, a little birdsong, leaves rustling across the lawn. But no reply from the shed. I wash out my mug, find room for the historical novel on the bookshelf, and retreat upstairs, full of the sense of possibility. Why shouldn’t this be my time?
The only question is what to do with it. Not what I’ve been doing, I know that much.
On the nightstand, Stacy’s key.
I really should have insisted on her taking it back. This key has become a symbol of derailment, the alternate autumn I was meant to live. It’s a painful reminder.
I squeeze the floaty in my hand. Hard.
It smells of plastic, and when I drop the key, my hand smells of plastic too. But when I bring it to my face and inhale the scent of my skin, I pretend what I’m smelling is the salty, crashing sea.
chapter 11
Only Trying to Help
Blame everything on the dream.
Or rather, me waking up in the middle of the dream.
At five in the morning, stumbling down the hall from the bathroom, Jed or Eli (I don’t know which) must have knocked something over (I don’t know what). I hear the crash just as Mother Zacchaeus removes one of the enamel pins from her shirt to stick it onto mine. The sound startles her, and she drives the sharp back right through the fabric of my top and into my skin.
“Ouch,” I say, only to find myself bolt upright in bed, blinking in the dark.
When your dreams run their course, you remember them the next day as dreams—assuming you remember them at all. When you wake up in the middle, though, the dream stays real. I can feel Mother Zacchaeus’s presence in the bedroom with me, not to mention the pain in my chest from where she stuck the pin.
What had she been doing? Giving me an award for distinguished service.
“You saved that girl, Beth. You are a good Christian woman.”
Disoriented, I switch on the lamp. It’s strange not to find Mother Zacchaeus in the room. Then I remember that crashing sound. What was it? Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I step into my slippers and creep into the hallway to investigate. My toe collides with something on the floor. Whatever it is, it’s light enough to go skidding over the floorboards.
I switch on the light. From the ground, St. Rick stares up at me. The nail he used to hang from is there on the floor too. Eli must have pounded it straight into the plaster, which has a tendency to crumble, and at a right angle. The weight of the painting, though slight, would have been enough to work the nail out over time. I keep a lecture on file in my brain: the evils of not using the special plaster hangers to put pictures on the wall. But it’s five in the morning. I’m not going to wake him up to go over the fine points of decorating.
Besides, no harm done. Not much anyway. I pick the painting up to inspect for damage and find one of the corners dimpled from impact.
I frown at St. Rick. “Serves you right.”
The next morning, while I’m digging through the drawer where I keep the plaster hangers, Holly calls. Before she can give me a hard time for my no-show at the book club, I butt in with Marlene’s unexpected visit.
“I’m a little worried Jed has a crush on this girl,” I tell her. This makes it sound like I’m sharing because of Jed, not to get off the hook.
But Holly’s not interested in my son’s love life. I missed more than a bodice ripping last night. The book barely came up. The ladies were too busy talking about the latest scandal.
“It’s probably better you weren’t there,” she says. “Apparently the drug-sniffing dogs at Eli’s school found marijuana in a lot of kids’ lockers. Including two who are in the youth group at The Community. Thanks to zero tolerance, that’s an automatic suspension. One of the kids posted on Facebook that all of his friends do it, and it’s unfair to single out only the people who got caught.”
While she goes on, describing the reactions at the book club, all I can hear is the blood pounding in my head.
“Who are the kids?” I finally ask.
She mentions the names, but I don’t recognize them. Eli knows them, I’m sure. And they’ll know him too. I lean on the counter to steady myself. I feel physically sick.
“It’s terrible,” I say.
“I know, I know. But the way some of those ladies go on about it, you’d think they were never in high school themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning anything. Still, you have to admit, there are worse things those kids could be into. Look at your houseguest from the other day.”
“I feel for their parents.”
“Yeah, you have a point there. They’ll have a hard time showing their faces at church. It shouldn’t be that way, though, if you ask me.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” I say, too emphatically.
When I get off the phone, all I can think is, That could have been Eli. The bad part is, I’ve known for days and still haven’t said anything. I wanted confirmation. I imagined him denying everything and then rebelling. Or worse, pretending to mend his ways only to hatch more sophisticated plans for deceiving me.
What he needs is a wake-up call. Maybe these suspensions will do the trick. Then again, maybe not. There has to be something I can do, something to make sure he never touches the stuff again.
“You saved that girl,” Mother Zacchaeus says. I feel the pain in my chest again.
“Thank you,” I say aloud. She’s absolutely right, and she’s given me an idea.
So that’s how the trouble started.
No Cool Mom sunglasses for me. I let Eli get a good look at my baby browns. Steely and merciless. Impossible to question. He puts his bike in the back, careful not to scratch his new Brooks saddle. When he slips into the passenger seat, he looks uneasy.
“What’s going on?”
“You’ll see,” I tell him. “Trust me.”
As we drive south into town, Eli’s earphones come out of the bag. He cranks some tunes and starts slapping out the rhythm on his thigh. I smile. This show of absorption has the opposite effect of what he intends.
“You’re trying too hard,” I say.
He pretends not to hear me.
Soon enough, his hands go still. He tugs on the white wire snaking up his chest, popping the earbuds free.
He knows.
He knows I know about the marijuana. He knows the reckoning is about to come. And I’m pretty sure it’s dawned on him where we’re going. His brows furrow in concentration. No doubt he is working on his defense, trying to come up with the best strategy for dealing with whatever I have in store for him. He doesn’t say anything, though, and neither do I. We’re waiting each other out.
Finding Mission Up isn’t easy. The first time I visited, I wasn’t paying close attention to the route. Plus, this grid of huddled inner-city blocks all looks the same to me. Once I get us to the general vicinity, we cruise up and down the streets in search of the telltale pink accents and the hand-lettered sign. Eli keeps craning his neck at the sights.
“Did you see that?” he says as we roll through an intersection. “Those guys back there?”
“What’s the matter? Never seen a deal go down?”
He laughs nervously. “Not out in the open like that.”
I’m already past Mission Up before I realize we’ve found it. As I double back, Eli double-checks that the VW’s doors are locked.
“We’re not getting out,” he says.
“That’s where we’re going, right across the street.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not going anywhere. Are you crazy? Do you realize where we are?”
