Soon the Light Will Be Perfect

by Dave Patterson

  My mother opens her eyes and looks through the haze at Taylor next to her then up at me. Taylor jumps out of the bed and pushes past me. She runs out of the room, leaving the door open.

  “What’s happening?” my mother says, confused. She tries to sit up.

  “Nothing, Mom,” I say. I place my hand on her shoulder. “It must have been one of your dreams. Go back to sleep.”

  She lies back down. Her quick breaths settle, and within moments, she’s sleeping again.

  There’s a crashing that sounds like lightning or somebody setting off a firecracker left over from the Fourth of July. I hear the sound again and realize it’s coming from the garage.

  I run out of my parents’ room. The garage door is open, and I catch Taylor sprinting into the woods that lead to the double-wide.

  When she disappears, I look back into the garage. The table has been knocked off the sawhorses and rests on its side. I step closer and see that the glossy surface has been gouged with a pattern of large, chaotic circles. The lacquer, all those layers my father, my brother and I applied, is ruined. The scratches are dug all the way to the wood. A flathead screwdriver lies on the concrete floor.

  “What the fuck did you do?” my brother’s voice says behind me. When I don’t respond, he finally says, “Grab the other end.” Together we lift the table back on to the sawhorses. We examine the scratched surface without talking. My father won’t be home for a week, but the waiting will be my penance.

  “You’re fucked,” my brother laughs. He goes into the house, and I sit on the front steps alone, waiting for lightning to spill out of the charged sky.

  XV

  My mother sits on the edge of the bed screaming in quick successions between sharp intakes of breath. Her hands slap her thighs beneath her purple nightgown. Her eyes are closed. Scream. Breath. Scream. Pearls of sweat bead on her forehead despite the fan in the window. My father stands above her, shaking her shoulders, pleading, “Wake up. It’s a dream.”

  My brother and I huddle in the doorway, shocked into silence. The overhead light seems too bright. It’s three in the morning—I checked when I heard the screaming from my bed. Scream. Breath. Scream. Sweat drips from her chin.

  “Wake up,” my father says. “A dream.”

  My mother’s eyes snap open. She looks at my father. He stops shaking her. She gasps for air, taking in a deep breath before letting it out.

  “A dream,” my brother says.

  “Only a dream,” I add.

  My mother looks at us in the doorway and frowns. “Yes,” she says, “a bad dream.” She opens her mouth to say more, but she’s going to be sick. My brother and I step back into the hallway to allow her to run to the bathroom. She vomits and my father tells us to go back to bed.

  * * *

  My mother slumps on the couch in her nightgown. She sips black tea my father prepared in the microwave while my brother and I eat cereal. My father has returned from his contracting job in Tennessee; he’s waiting to hear if they have more work for him. Because we have no kitchen table, we all sit on the couch. I pick at a scratch on the armrest where the cats had clawed at the fabric, exposing the yellow cushion beneath.

  My mother appears troubled. She squints down at the green carpet, her lips pursed tight. My father stands and says to her, “You should get some rest before your appointment.”

  She looks up at my father and forms her lips into a half smile. “I don’t want to fall asleep,” she says. “The chemo dreams.”

  Her hair is thinning more now. White splotches of scalp appear beneath her brown hair.

  “The doctor said to write the dreams down,” my father says. “It might help you take control of them.”

  “I can’t. They’re getting more—disturbing.” My mother eyes my brother and me and doesn’t say any more. I want to know what she sees when she dreams, what is making her wake in the middle of the night screaming in terror.

  “Try to get them on paper,” my father says. He helps her stand. Before he takes her down the hall to their room, he says to me, “Put on work clothes and meet me in the garage.”

  When my parents are out of the room, my brother laughs. “I can’t believe your crazy girlfriend fucked up our table,” he says.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I say. At least I don’t think she is.

  “I heard her family got kicked out of the double-wide they were living in and she had to move to our old trailer park. It’s better that way—you don’t want to date trailer trash.”

  “We used to live in a trailer,” I say.

  “Exactly,” my brother says.

  * * *

  The scratches in the polyurethane are deep. I run my fingertip along the grooves etched into the surface. Some of them cut through the thick layers of polyurethane down to the wood. Ruined, I think. A pang of electricity runs through my veins—it’s a feeling I’ve had often this summer, that somehow everything is my fault: the table, my mother, the layoffs at my father’s plant, even the war in some way.

  My father walks up to the tabletop resting on wooden sawhorses. He leans down to examine the chaotic pattern of scratches. He traces the marks with his thumbnail. The bandage on his hand is clean. In Tennessee, his fever became so bad he finally went to a free clinic for poor people to get antibiotics. He told my mother that the doctor called it sepsis. If the infection had gotten any worse, he explained to her, they would have needed to operate.

  “When I saw the table after I got home I thought it was destroyed,” he says, “but then my mind got to work and I realized that it’s just an obstacle to overcome, a problem to solve with the craft of carpentry.” He seems almost happy.

  We stare at the table. He continues to work the grooves with his thumbnail. I wait for him to mention Taylor. I’m convinced he knows that she was in the house and that we kissed in the woods—that I touched her breast. If he asks, I won’t know how to tell him that it was beautiful and strange at the same time. But we don’t talk like that.

  “I called some guys at the plant to ask how they would take care of this,” he says. “It’s simple. All we need is time and elbow grease—and that’s something we have.”

  He looks at me and I understand that he’s not going to demand I explain how the table was damaged or if Taylor was in the house while he was at work or if we kissed with my hand on her. I’m relieved, but there’s also a sense that big important questions will go unanswered.

  At his workbench, my father prepares two sanding blocks with rough grit sandpaper. “Because the job is so delicate,” he says, “we can’t use power tools.” He holds up the two plastic sanding blocks equipped with new sheets of paper. “It’s to be done with care.”

  Peering over the lenses of his glasses, he inspects a scratch along the edge of the tabletop. “Like this,” he says, moving the sanding block in a circular motion. I lean in and study the careful movements. He stops and hands me a sanding block. “You work from the other side, and we’ll meet in the middle. It should only take a few days to strip the surface. After that, I’ll apply more coats then assemble the table and we’ll move it inside the house.” He smiles at me. “Simple as that,” he says.

  I sand my side of the table, and my father watches me, correcting my motion by saying slower or tighter circles, until he’s satisfied with my work, then he settles into his own movements.

  It feels good to focus all my energy on such a tiny point in the universe. To work at a problem with a clear solution. The rhythm of the job flows over me, and I understand why my father has spent hours in the garage since the start of summer.

  We work at the damaged polyurethane in silence. Every so often my father whistles a hymn from church. He even breaks into the chorus of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” at one point. By his demeanor he must expect to get more contract work in Tennessee. I’m starting to be able to look at my father without seeing L
arry Anderson hanging from a belt.

  The trance of our work is broken by screams from inside the house. We look up from the table at each other.

  My father shakes my mother awake on the bed as her primordial scream echoes off the wood floors. It doesn’t sound like my mother; it doesn’t sound human. When my mother opens her eyes, she rocks back and forth. “It’s getting so bad,” she says.

  My father wipes the sweat from her forehead. Her thinning hair is matted against her scalp. She continues to rock as my father holds her. Her breathing calms, and my father reaches to the nightstand for a pen and a yellow legal pad. He holds the pen and notepad out to my mother. I make out the neat loops of my mother’s cursive crossed out on the ruled lines, as if she’s started to write her dreams many times, but always stops herself.

  “Write,” my father says. “When we see the doctor today you can tell him what you see when you sleep.”

  My mother takes the paper and pen, but doesn’t write.

  “We’ll work in the garage for another hour, then I’ll take you to your appointment,” my father says.

  The pen hovers over the lined paper. My mother stares at the blank page. What can be so horrifying that she won’t even put it into words? My father leads me out of the room, and when I look back, my mother holds the pen suspended above the yellow paper.

  My father doesn’t whistle hymns from church or sing the words to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” as we finish our work. When I think of the sounds my mother makes or the look on her face when she wakes I get a sinking feeling, like gravity has been turned up.

  My father stops moving his sanding block over the polyurethane and looks at his watch. “I need to take your mother to the hospital,” he says. “I don’t want you or anyone else in the garage while we’re gone.”

  I nod, but don’t look at him, afraid again he might mention Taylor.

  * * *

  I stand on the threshold of my parents’ bedroom and stare at the yellow notepad on the nightstand. My parents are at the hospital. My brother is at his girlfriend’s house, begging her not to break up with him. I am alone. I recognize the crossed-out sentences on the paper from across the room but hesitate to pick up the notepad and try to read her words. They are just dreams, after all. But the look on her face—the feral intensity of her screams... I have never seen my mother scared. Not when my brother’s leg snapped two summers ago and white bone tore through his skin. Not when I had a temperature of one hundred and five and saw my dead uncle standing in the corner of my room. And not when she told us that she had cancer.

  I walk across the room and sit on the bed. The bottle of holy water from the Jordan River rests on its side, empty, the cap missing. I inspect the glass bottle with a simple printed label and wonder how we could get more. Maybe we didn’t have enough for the miracle to hold. I replace the empty bottle and stare at the yellow notepad. Pushing away the thoughts of my mother’s contorted face when she wakes from the nightmares, I snatch the pad from the nightstand and squint to make out the words she’s scratched out—faceless and meat and splinter and laughing are all I can decipher.

  I want to see what is tormenting her. I flip through the pages of the yellow legal pad, but the rest of the pages are blank.

  I try to conjure what could be torturing her dreams and without warning, a painting Father Brian once showed us in catechism class appears in my mind. Fond of art, Father Brian often used classical paintings to illustrate stories from the Bible. Once, while discussing the Book of Job, the young priest passed around an art textbook open to a painting of Job by a French painter. The painting was horrifying: Job sitting on the bare earth, naked, illuminated by a blinding light, darkness behind him, his muscles all sinew and pulsing veins, arms out to his sides, palms up, his white beard yellowing, neck bent, eyes peering up beyond the edge of the painting. Most of the boys at catechism snickered at Job’s naked body, but I did not laugh. The image of a man stripped of everything—vulnerable in the purest sense—made me tremble. Sitting on my parents’ bed, holding the notepad my mother refuses to fill with words to describe her nightmares, the painting of Job is the most terrifying image I can imagine. I stare at the floral-print wallpaper next to the bed, and suddenly, Job appears. His naked shoulders rise slowly with his shallow breaths. I am paralyzed on the bed. His eyes do not waver from looking up to heaven. He makes low whimpering sounds. The vision is so real, I feel I could reach out and touch his bony wrists.

  In the driveway there’s a metal bang of a car door closing. I turn to the hallway, and when I look back at the wall, Job is gone, and there’s only the floral wallpaper. I place the notepad on the nightstand next to the empty bottle of holy water and run to the living room.

  “Go wait in the garage,” my father says when he and my mother come into the house.

  I stare at my mother. Her eyelids droop with the drugged heaviness of chemo. My father begins to lead her down the hallway.

  “The garage,” my father says when he sees that I’m still on the couch, staring down the hallway.

  My mother looks up at me through the haze of her treatment. I must have a horrified look on my face, because her eyes widen and she shakes her head. Before she can speak, my father leads her down the hall.

  * * *

  The work is slow. My father has to take breaks to massage the wound on his hand. When he catches me trying to rush the sandpaper over the scratched surface, he says, “Careful.” Then he models the soft, circular motion. I mimic his movements, but I’m distracted. I can’t shake the image of Job in the room with my mother. I get the feeling that someone is breathing on my neck and I jump. My father eyes me for a moment and goes back to sanding the table.

  After an hour, he’s whistling church hymns again. My shoulders ache from sanding; my lower back is tight from bending over. I straighten my spine to stretch.

  “That’s good for today,” my father says. “We don’t want to get sloppy with our work.”

  He walks over to my side of the table and inspects the surface, running his hand over the area I’ve sanded. He smiles. “Not bad,” he says.

  He places his arm over my shoulder, and we stare at the table. I think he’s going to ask me about Taylor. Maybe he’ll tell me about how when he was young he kissed a girl like Taylor, that he understands—despite what Father Brian says at church about sexual desire. Perhaps he’ll tell me that it’s okay to have these feelings. But instead he removes his arm from my shoulder and places the sanding blocks on the workbench. He says, “I’m going to the store for more sandpaper. Will your brother be home to eat with us?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “He’s gone a lot lately,” he says.

  “I guess.”

  He removes the worn pieces of sandpaper from the sanding blocks. “While I’m at the store don’t wake your mother. If she has an episode—” he pauses “—just shake her gently and tell her she’s safe.”

  Through the living room window I watch my father drive away. When he’s gone, I sneak into my parents’ room and watch my mother dream from the doorway. Her eyelids twitch, but she doesn’t look distressed. Standing next to her is Job making his moaning sounds. I shudder, though he doesn’t look threatening. He’s frail, pathetic. He raises a hand and places it on my mother’s shoulder. He’s not praying over her like people at church. It’s something sadder, more desperate than prayer. The vision of Job hovering over my mother has me frozen in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” my brother’s voice says, but I’m transfixed on naked Job and my mother in the deep sleep of chemotherapy. He slaps my shoulder, and Job disappears. I expect him to ridicule me for watching our mother sleep, but he only stands next to me and stares, too.

  * * *

  That night my father, brother and I eat frozen pizza in the living room without talking. The news shows the president at a podium in the White House Rose Garde
n, talking about national stability.

  “There should be plenty of orders for tanks and guns at the plant in Tennessee,” my father says when the camera cuts away from the president. My father isn’t talking to my brother or to me. “I bet they’ll call tomorrow,” he says.

  My mind doesn’t race with the morality of this war as it has all summer—my mother’s dreams now occupy that space.

  The gray-haired news anchor discusses an oil spill in the Persian Gulf, but we aren’t listening. We’re all thinking about my mother sleeping down the hall, lost in our own terrors of what is tormenting her. I try not to think about Job. When the news cuts to commercial, my father takes our empty plates to the kitchen.

  “Have you tried to read the notepad?” my brother whispers.

  I nod.

  “What could it be?” He looks down the hallway.

  I consider telling him that Job is in the room with our mother—he saw the painting at catechism class—but I’m too afraid to form the words.

  My father comes back into the room. “We start early tomorrow,” my father says. I turn to him, confused. “On the table. We can finish if we work before church, then get right to work after mass.”

  I nod and try to shake the image of Job.

  “That table needs to be finished,” my father says, but he’s talking to himself again. On the television a man drinks from a beer bottle and tells us that it’s better than its competitors, but we don’t listen, we’re all waiting for the cries down the hall.

  * * *

  My father is waking me. Outside my bedroom window the sun hasn’t yet risen over the pine trees.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Five,” he says.

  Before going out to the garage, we eat breakfast on the back porch as the rising sun begins to lighten the sky. The morning air is cool—I shiver as it works over my skin. Today my father is assigned to be the lector at mass. His Bible is splayed open on the patio table next to his bowl of oatmeal. Between bites he whispers words from the Book of Galatians he’ll read later this morning. I wonder if Father Brian will finally return to church, but I’m pretty sure he’s never coming back. Though my mother is sick, my father, brother and I don’t miss Sunday mass—that’s a mortal sin we do not want on our souls. With my father occupied by the Bible verses, I spoon the last of my sugary corn cereal into my mouth and say, “I need to go to the bathroom.”