by Leslie Gould
As Nathan hurried out the door, she looked at the clock above the stove: 7:30 A.M. Andrew needed to get ready for school.
“Mommy, when are you going to make my cake?” Audrey asked.
“Soon. Honey, would you tell the big boys to come eat? Please?”
Caye put Liam at the table in the eating nook and poured Cheerios into a bowl. He hiccuped and picked up his spoon as Caye poured the milk. Immediately Simon, seeing his chance to be held, began to cry. Caye picked him up. He wiped his mushy banana-covered mouth on her sleeve. Scout settled on the floor next to Liam’s chair and kept an eye on the cat sitting by the back door.
“They’re playing LEGOs,” Audrey yelled.
“Tell them to get dressed,” Caye called out.
“Get out of here!” Andrew shouted at his sister.
“I’m telling!” Audrey screamed.
Caye ignored them. If it comes to blows or blood, I’ll intervene. She wished Nathan had started the coffee. She let Abra outside.
“They’re not getting dressed,” Audrey announced, stomping into the kitchen. She wore the black rubber boots with her Barbie nightgown. She sat down beside Liam. “Did you know it’s my birthday?”
Liam hiccuped again and took a bite of Cheerios.
Caye walked down the hall. “Come on, Andrew,” she called out.
No answer.
She looked into the room. Both boys were sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by a red, yellow, blue, black, and white pool of LEGOs.
It was Thursday. Hudson had preschool. He went on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He didn’t have to be there until nine—and maybe wouldn’t get there at all today. A third of the time, at least, Jill kept him home.
Andrew was in the second grade—he shouldn’t skip.
“Here’s the propeller,” Andrew said to Hudson, tossing the red plastic set of miniature blades across the room.
The image of forcing all five kids into the station wagon again jolted through her head. Oh, well. He’ll just have to miss.
The CAT scan was behind her. A young man from transportation had pushed her down to radiology. My trip through the donut hole. She’d held her breath, flat on her back, while the bizarre machine whirled around her and clicked the images. Then an older woman with long gray hair wheeled her back.
Jill reached for the phone. Rob had gone out to the nurses’ station to see when Dr. Miles would make his rounds. She knew the number by heart. Stephanie had been baby-sitting for the kids since she was a sophomore at the college. She was a senior this year but took the term off to earn money. She waited tables in the evenings at a restaurant in town and baby-sat the boys two mornings a week. She lived with her aunt and uncle on the Greensprings Highway, east of town.
“Hi, Stephanie. It’s Jill. Can you sit this morning? “Great. Not at my house—at Caye’s. For her daughter, too. Do you remember where they live? “Good. At 10:30? “Perfect.”
The nurse brought in breakfast. Jill hadn’t eaten since the broth last night, but she wasn’t hungry. She reached for the juice. She’d try to get a little down.
Rob stuck his head in the room.
“Hey, you,” she said. “You can go to work. Caye’s coming around eleven.”
“Look who’s here,” Rob said as he came all the way through the door, followed by Joya and Thomas.
Caye looked at all five kids with satisfaction. Each was dressed and fed. Keeping up her hurried pace, she ran down to the basement, pulled the wrinkled clothes out of the dryer and stuffed them into a basket, and then threw the load of wet wash into the dryer. Back up the stairs she ran. She would put Simon on the bathroom floor to play while she showered. She would instruct Audrey to stay next to Liam for the next fifteen minutes and not let him out of her sight. The phone rang.
It was Rita from the Fellowship. She was in her early fifties, divorced, with a grown son and daughter. She worked as a loan officer at a Medford bank.
“What’s going on with Jill?” she asked.
“She’s having tests—over at Rogue Valley.”
“Joya left a message last night. She said they were testing for cancer.”
Did Joya, from hearing that a CAT scan was scheduled, know they were checking for cancer? Caye wondered. Joya was a nurse. Or had been a nurse.
“I think it’s just the usual tests,” Caye answered.
After a quick good-bye and an “I’ll let you know when I hear anything,” Caye scooped up Simon, grabbed the plastic bucket of rattles she kept for him to play with, and rushed into the bathroom with the phone still in her hand.
It rang again. It was Lonnie, another Fellowship member. He was married to Summer and after six years at the college still hadn’t finished his computer science degree. Summer worked as a secretary in the English department.
“Is it true?” he asked.
“Is what true?” Caye responded.
“Does Jill have cancer?”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s what Joya’s message sounded like.”
“They’re testing for it,” Caye answered Lonnie impatiently, aware that she had just lied to Rita.
“Unbelievable,” he sighed.
“I know,” Caye answered. Her impatience melted away. Unbelievable was right.
“But I don’t think it’s that,” Caye said. “I think she’s exhausted and has a bad virus.”
The doorbell rang. The dog began to bark.
“Gotta go, Lonnie,” she said. “Ask Summer to pray. I’ll keep you posted.”
Perhaps Rob talked to Thomas last night. Or this morning. Maybe Rob already knows the CAT scan results and called Joya first.
She glanced at her watch—it was 10:35. She was still in her nightshirt—her bloodstained, snot-covered, banana-splattered nightshirt. The doorbell rang again. She peered out the window.
Stephanie, Jill’s baby-sitter, stood on the porch.
“We’re praying that above all else you will have faith,” Joya said. She kissed Jill good-bye, straining to reach her forehead, and added, “I talked to Gwen this morning. She said to tell you she’s praying too.”
“Tell her thanks,” Jill said, thinking of all the members of the Fellowship. She knew they’d be concerned.
“God bless,” Thomas added, patting Jill’s shoulder.
Rob stood and shook Thomas’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “We’ll give you a call as soon as we know anything.”
“That was weird,” Rob said to Jill as the door swung shut.
“Shh,” she answered, looking at the clock across the room. “Oh no—I forgot to call Caye to tell her to come over. Would you hand me the phone?”
7
Caye quickly washed her hair in the bathroom sink, toweled it dry, and slipped on her jeans and T-shirt. She gave each of the kids a quick good-bye and ran to her station wagon. Stephanie stood on the front porch, holding Simon in her arms. Caye waved as she backed the car onto the street and headed north.
Joya had already been to see Jill. Caye wasn’t surprised.
Had Jill asked Joya and Thomas to go see her? Was that why Jill called Stephanie to baby-sit? So that Caye wouldn’t feel left out?
Don’t be petty. She heard the words in Nathan’s voice. You’re reacting to the way you’re feeling right now—not to what you know.
Caye had felt embarrassed as she stuck her head out the door to Stephanie. It felt like a comedy of errors as Stephanie stammered out why she was there, that Jill had asked her to come.
“But Jill’s not here,” Caye declared, confused. “She’s in the hospital.”
“The hospital?” And so it went, both trying to figure out what was going on until the phone rang.
“Caye!” Jill had said. “Can you come over?”
“Really, really,” Jill said to Rob. “Go. I’m feeling much better. My eyes are even back to norm
al—I just checked. I really think this was just a fluke.”
Rob reached for his computer.
“Have some faith,” she said with a smile.
“Faith? Or denial?”
She ignored the comment.
“I’ll call when I get to work,” Rob said. “Page me if you need me sooner. I forgot my cell at the house.” He bent over and kissed her.
She felt relief when he left. A few minutes alone before Caye arrived would provide a needed break. Joya and Thomas had drained her.
Jill and Rob had been tight with Thomas and Joya when they’d all lived in Argentina. Thomas translated the Bible, and Joya worked as a nurse. They had two children when Jill first met them—a three-year-old boy named David and baby Louise. Rob was in charge of the computer system for the translating mission, until he took a job setting up a network for an international import business.
Thomas and Joya were quite offended by Rob’s change of priorities.
Jill went to Argentina to work as a governess, a glorified nanny, for a diplomats family of six kids. The children’s grandparents had paid for her services to teach the three preschool children; the older kids went to the embassy school.
Two months after Rob and Jill met they became engaged. Soon after, Thomas and Joya’s son, David, fell ill one night with a fever while Joya was at work. Thomas called her; Joya said to give him Tylenol.
The next morning, when Joya came home from the hospital, she found David burning hot, limp, and whimpering in his bed beside Louise’s crib. Joya rushed out into the street with her son dangling in her arms, hailed a taxi, and yelled up to Thomas, who was leaning out their fourth-floor window, that she would call him, that he must check Louise and bring her to the hospital if she was feverish too.
Two hours later David was dead from meningitis.
Joya quit her job and stayed in the apartment. She hardly ate.
Rob and Jill would stop by in the evenings to try to cheer them up. They’d bring fruit and flowers, suggest they all go to the beach. Joya would just shake her head. Jill remembered Joya’s long, light brown hair uncombed, her clothes wrinkled, her lips tight with grief.
Thomas was, with good reason, worried about his wife and their marriage. He felt that she blamed him—at least that’s what Thomas told Rob. Thomas suggested that the two couples meet to pray and study the Bible together.
Jill found Joya fascinating, the whole incident macabre and heart wrenching. She wondered how she and Rob would deal with such a tragedy. Would one blame the other, pull away, turn inward? One summer night the four of them sat in Thomas and Joya’s home. The balcony doors were open to let in a hot breeze. The fans whirred out a comforting harmony.
Joya sipped the peach smoothie that Jill had brought for her. Louise was asleep in her bamboo crib in her parents’ room, where she’d been moved after David’s death. The door was halfway open.
“I think Joya’s better,” Thomas reported with a smile.
Joya pushed her hair from her face with a frown and said, “Thanks for the smoothie, Jill.”
The next week Jill brought a chocolate milkshake from the new McDonald’s down the street and a couture scarf she had purchased at Saks in New York the year before. Joya led an austere life, seldom spending money on herself. Joya fingered the fuchsia-colored silk, held it to her cheek, wadded it into a ball, and put it in her lap.
The topic that evening was faith.
“God is impressed with faith,” Thomas said, following his usual teaching style of starting out with a simple statement. “He asks us to live each moment of our lives in faith.”
At that moment Jill imagined Joya clutching David, hailing a taxi outside the apartment building.
“That’s why bad things happen,” Joya said. “Because we don’t have enough faith.”
“Oh, Joya,” Jill said. “Do you really think so?” Jill leaned forward, reaching across the hot room with her words.
“I was discontent here in Argentina. God wanted to point out my sin.” Joya took a deep, quivering breath. “When I knew David was sick that night, I didn’t pray. And at the hospital the next day, while he was dying, I prayed, but my faith was weak.”
Joya shifted her legs; the scarf fell to the floor. She continued, “It wasn’t God’s will for David to die. God brought us here—I would have been perfectly happy staying in New Mexico. How could it have been his will to bring us here and then have David die?”
Thomas went over, took Joya’s hand, and sat beside her on the couch. The image seared itself into Jill’s mind—Thomas, at six feet four inches with his strawberry-blond hair and beard, bending over his tiny wife. He looked like a fair-haired Abraham Lincoln. The fans whirred.
Joya stood and pulled her hand away from Thomas, leaving the scarf on the floor. She walked into the bedroom.
Jill and Rob left soon after, dumbfounded.
After that, Joya did start to get better, but a few weeks later when Jill tried to bring the subject up, when she said, “Jova, I want to talk with you about what you said about faith—”
Joya put her hand up and said, “Stop. Please. I can’t talk about it anymore.”
Thomas seemed relieved that Joya no longer blamed him. Six months later, just after Rob and Jill returned to Argentina after their wedding, Thomas and Joya moved back to the States and settled in Medford. Thomas took a job teaching Latin-American studies at the college in Ashland. Joya had wanted to return to New Mexico. Thomas wanted more intellectual challenge.
Rob told Jill he thought it was easier for Joya to blame herself than to blame God—or keep blaming Thomas. Rob surmised that she couldn’t accept that God would allow David to die—so it was easier to blame it on her “lack of faith” than to deal with her anger toward God.
By the time Jill and Rob had hooked back up with Thomas and Joya, bringing Caye and Nathan with them, the Fellowship had been in existence for just over a year. Joya and Thomas started it out of frustration. “The whole culture shock thing,” Joya had explained. “It’s so hard to get used to the pretensions of the American church after having been away.”
Gwen and John, a childless couple in their midforties, had first joined Joya and Thomas for a Bible study. Summer and Lonnie were in their late twenties and had joined next. By then the members were referring to it as “the Fellowship.” Rita was a neighbor of Thomas and Joya. She’d joined a year before the Rhones and Becks.
Most of the members had grown up attending church. “We have a lot of depth,” Thomas had told Rob. “I think you’ll be pleased.”
Jill noted the stark surroundings of Thomas and Joya’s ranch-style house that first Sunday that they attended the Fellowship. Joya had furnished it simply. One cream-colored sofa, circa 1980, eight straight-back chairs, an oak dining room table, a roll-top desk in the corner of the living room. All the walls were painted eggshell. Two framed travel prints of Argentina hung vertically over the couch. There was no TV in their home. The computer was in the back bedroom, the room Thomas used as a study.
Jill was pleased to meet the other people and to study the first chapter of John together. Light and darkness. The Word. Thomas was a good teacher, bringing in history, culture, literature, explaining it all concisely. Louise had grown into a beautiful girl with Thomas’s strawberry-blond hair and Joya’s greenish eyes. She colored quietly at her child-size table with the white Formica top in the corner of the dining room. She seemed obedient but sullen. Watching her made Jill sad.
After the teaching, they all shared a potluck meal. The entire event felt satisfying, mostly. Jill had a flash of hesitation when Joya sent Louise to her room for a time-out after she spilled her milk.
“We’ll need to figure out a program for the kids—if you, Rob, Caye, and Nathan commit,” Joya said, standing at the door in a denim skirt and a pink blouse as they left. “Hudson and Andrew are too active to be near the adults.”
Jill tried
to shoo away her defensive feelings toward Joya’s comment. She held Hudson close as they walked out the door. She felt a pang of guilt—false guilt, she knew—for having a beautiful little boy in her arms. She thought of Joya sitting on the couch in her Argentine apartment wadding the silk scarf into a ball.
The boys, who had played with wooden alphabet blocks in the hall for most of the time, hadn’t bothered her. When Hudson got fussy, Jill sat in the hallway and nursed him. She thought the boys had behaved quite well.
Months later, Joya had chastised Summer for complaining that Lonnie wasn’t finishing up his degree. It had happened during a Sunday morning group while the men and women were separated into groups. “Were not here to gripe about our husbands,” Joya had stated.
Caye commented about the incident the next day to Jill. “She’s right,” Jill said, coming to Joya’s defense. “It would be horrible to let it turn into a free-for-all.”
“I think God’s given you a special grace when it comes to Joya,” Caye told Jill.
It was the snippiest that Caye had ever been with Jill.
After that, Caye started a program for the kids, writing the curriculum, coming up with crafts, developing a story to tell each week. She worked with the children two Sundays a month and the other members took turns the other Sundays under Caye’s direction.
“I like it,” Caye insisted. “I didn’t get all those stories as a child. I’m learning right along with the kids.”
Jill was impressed with Caye’s dedication. It would have driven her crazy to be locked in a room with the kids and a flannelboard two mornings a month. The one thing she learned from her days as a “governess” was that she didn’t want to be a teacher. She was the happiest, while living in the diplomat’s house, hanging out with the cook and the gardener.
The nurse swished through the door. “Message from Dr. Miles,” she said. “He won’t be in this morning after all. He’ll touch base this afternoon. I’ll have your lunch here in a few minutes.”
Lunch? So soon?