Shirley didn’t speak. She simply sat down and watched me with huge, watery eyes.
Marie appeared in the adjoining kitchen moments later, her math book under her arm. “Hey, what’s up with you two, anyway? You act like you’re at a funeral or something.” She chuckled at her own wit, and my heart twisted again. Though she didn’t mean anything by it, she’d regret that remark someday.
Memories flooded over me.
“Mom,” I’d said one day a couple of months before her death, “you have to be more careful.” She’d taken too many pain pills, not because she’d wanted to, but because she couldn’t remember how many she’d taken, and she’d still been sleeping when I came home from school. The drug had made her heartbeat irregular, and the doctor had warned her that the effects could be potentially deadly.
Mom had laughed. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good.” I gave her my best deadpan. “Because I really don’t have time to attend a funeral, what with my great debut and all.” We’d both laughed ourselves silly.
Later, after the accidental overdose that took her life, there was nothing funny about it.
“Well,” Shirley stood. “I’m going to zip home and see if my rolls are ready for baking. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes.”
That she’d left rolls rising verified my suspicions; she’d gone to the school just for Marie.
In a way, I supposed my daughter had a sort of angel in Shirley. How odd that the Lord would send Marie an angel when I was the one who needed one. But I would take whatever we could get; I wanted the best for my daughter.
After Shirley left, I said to Marie, “Shut the garage for me, okay?”
“Okay, just a minute.” She finished the problem she was working on before going to the door. “Uh, Mom,” she said, “Dad’s out there. He’s talking to Sister Jefferson. Oh, here he comes.” Marie went back to her homework.
Dean came in, leaving the garage door open. I decided it didn’t matter. I’d close it before I went up to bed—provided I could get to my feet by then.
Dean knelt by the couch where I lay sprawled, my head on top of Marie’s scriptures. He eased them out from under me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice gruff.
Because I didn’t want you to look at me like that.
There were looks that women craved from the men they loved—admiration, awe, trust, and especially that certain something between husband and wife that signaled intimacy. But not pity. That was one look a woman never needed to see from the man she loved.
“I was fine,” I said, my eyes filling with tears.
He hugged me. “No,” he whispered. “You’re not fine, but we’re going to make you that way.”
Good luck, I thought. He was going to need a lot of help.
Twenty minutes later, Shirley arrived with dinner.
Chapter Seven
My sickness and exhaustion lasted only one more day. By Friday, I was up and about, feeling relatively normal, as though there was nothing really wrong with me at all and the horror of the past days something I’d imagined. I still had an occasional pain in my abdomen and experienced periodic nausea, but that was nothing new.
Dean urged me to tell the children, but I begged for more time. I wanted first to know what direction I was headed before I ruined their lives. I think deep down I wanted to offer them the hope that I couldn’t find for myself.
The next two weeks rolled by smoothly. I no longer thought about my restaurant or made up lists of things I would need to buy before I could open. I didn’t clean house more than absolutely necessary, and I didn’t do anything in my calling as ward music chairman. Instead, I focused on my family. I bought cards and presents for all my grandsons and sent them off. I spent hours quizzing Brody for his AP exam, and his gratitude made me feel needed and loved. I took Marie wherever she and her friends wanted to go, volunteering to supervise every activity. I tried not to feel hurt when she didn’t thank me or acknowledge my presence.
“That child thinks of nothing but herself,” Dean said to me one day. Once I would have commiserated with him, but now I was happy Marie could still be selfish. Maybe selfish was the definition of fourteen. What fourteen-year-old girl ever looked for sadness on her mother’s face? What fourteen-year-old ever did her chores as well as her parents would like? What fourteen-year-old didn’t brag about her day and not ask anyone else what kind of day they’d had? What fourteen-year-old noticed when her mother lost weight or cried in the night?
I had managed to give birth to one daughter who hadn’t been a typical teen—Sharon. She had always been sensitive to my needs. As a young woman, she’d often called me from her baby-sitting jobs to ask how I was doing. Dean once told me that he always knew if Sharon was calling because he heard me say, “I love you, too” instead of “I love you.” Sharon had always seemed to be as happy spending time with me as with her friends, and I missed her living at home. She had married last year, at barely twenty, earlier than any of the others. I’d wanted to object, but how could I when I’d married Dean at that exact same age? Sharon’s husband was twenty-two, a returned missionary whose gray eyes lit up every time he looked at her. I felt they would make it, as Dean and I had.
If Sharon had been living at home, I wouldn’t have been able to fool her. Despite her busy schedule in college, she still called home three times a week, and so far I’d managed to direct our conversations away from me. She was happy, in love, and expecting her first baby. I didn’t want to take any of that joy away from her.
My older three boys hadn’t called, and my other daughter had called only once since the diagnosis. There wasn’t any need for covering up there. They were all content in their lives, and I was determined to leave it that way for as long as possible.
“Are you ready?” Dean asked.
I looked at Dean, who had been tidying the kitchen. Today I had to go in for more chemotherapy. Two weeks had passed, and my body was supposed to be recovered enough for another dose. Of course we hoped cancer cells wouldn’t be growing at their previous rapid rate, but it would be months before we knew if the plan had worked enough for me to get the surgery.
“I’m ready,” I said, forcing my voice to be light.
The drive to the hospital went faster than expected, and though I’d been through it once before, I was feeling nervous when we entered, but the nurses again quickly put me at ease. They offered me pillows and magazines before taking a blood sample through my port. If my white blood cell count was too low, they wouldn’t be able to give the chemo drugs to me. I passed with flying colors.
They also offered me water, as I was supposed to be well-hydrated the four hours before receiving one of the drugs, but I’d already had enough liquids to make me visit the bathroom twice in the last hour. That drug alone took nearly two hours to administer.
After an hour, Dean became restless, so I sent him to the cafeteria to buy an early lunch. “Do you want anything?” he asked.
“Maybe a roll,” I said. Bread was my staple nowadays. “White, not wheat.” For whatever reason, I couldn’t eat wheat bread without throwing up.
“I’ll see if they have a banana, too.” He’d been making sandwiches out of them for me, sometimes with a bit of peanut butter, since bananas were the only fruit I seemed to tolerate well these days. I was sick of both bananas and bread, but I always made an effort to eat the sandwiches when he made them, knowing it was one of the few things he felt he could do to help me.
The nurses had changed me to the next drug when a lady with graying hair settled in the chair next to mine in preparation for her treatment. I was curious about her, but Dean was the one who usually initiated personal questions to the other patients.
I’d already met Willy across from me, an old man with liver cancer, and the middle-aged man next to him called Joe, who hadn’t volunteered his diagnosis. Beyond Joe was a little boy named Eric who had leukemia and was there with both his parents. The mother’s eye
s were red, and she held her little boy’s hand so tightly, he kept complaining. His father sat with his arms folded across his chest, looking like someone had hit him in the stomach. Sandy, a sober, black-haired woman barely in her thirties, sat on my other side. She had breast cancer.
The new woman smiled at me. “This is my last time here.” Her face folded into wrinkles as she smiled, but her brown eyes were bright and alive.
I hoped that meant she’d been cured and not that they were giving up.
“You mean it’s still gone?” called the old man opposite us.
“That’s right, Willy. I’m cured.” She shrugged, “Well, you know how that goes. Last week my doctor told me it could come back any minute.” She deepened her voice to mimic him. “That’s the kind of cancer it is, Mrs. Jones.”
“Old Dr. Snell,” Willy said with a snort. “He don’t have a compassionate bone in his body, I don’t think.”
“Nonsense,” the woman said. “He just doesn’t like to lead us on, that’s all. And I don’t mind. I don’t intend to come back here ever.” There was a finality to her words, as though she would rather go to the next life than endure chemotherapy again.
“Like you said, that’s what kind of cancer it is,” Willy said. “There’s only so much surgery they can do.”
“What kind of cancer was it?” I asked.
She looked at me and smiled. “Pancreatic.”
“Really? Me too.” I know it’s stupid, but I felt an immediate kinship with this woman. She was the first one I’d met with my cancer, and to hear her talk, she was cured! That would put her in the ten percent who survived more than a year. That meant she now had a fifty percent chance of surviving beyond five years. Looking at her gave me hope.
“Hi, I’m Betty Jones. Are you new? I mean, newly diagnosed?”
I nodded. “Sort of. This is my second time here.”
“Then you’ve had the surgery?”
“No. The growth is too close to an artery. They’re trying to shrink it.”
Betty looked concerned. “Who’s your doctor?”
“Dr. Snell.”
She relaxed. “He’s the best. You’re in good hands.”
“I haven’t met any others,” I said.
“You mean with our kind of cancer. There were some I met here.” A shadow passed over Betty’s face. “Well, they put up a good fight. I’m sure there’s more we haven’t met.”
I wasn’t so sure—unless they were newly diagnosed like I was.
Betty kept up a steady stream of conversation. She talked about her two children and her six grandchildren. She mentioned her husband, who’d died of a heart attack two years earlier.
“I’m sorry,” I said, wondering how I could have faced this without Dean.
Betty shrugged. “It’s life. There’s no use looking behind us. We just go forward and find happiness where we can. The good Lord knows what He’s doing.” With a wave of her hand, she took in all the chairs and the poles that loomed over us—each supporting a bag of clear liquid poison that was supposed to cure us. “There’s a reason for this, even if we don’t know what that is right now. Like I said, no use looking behind us.”
No use looking behind us. Where had I heard that before?
Then I remembered Shirley. I’d become angry at her because I knew she couldn’t possibly understand, but I couldn’t say the same about Betty. She’d gone through all of this with only her married children—a son in St. George and a daughter in Houston—for support.
No use looking behind.
I felt as though Betty was telling me some secret that I couldn’t understand. I heard the words, but my mind simply didn’t stretch wide enough to let in the meaning.
“I’m leaving this weekend to visit my daughter and grandchildren in Houston,” Betty continued. “I’m going to stay as long as I’m wanted.”
Betty was a delightful woman, and I didn’t think her daughter would ever want to send her away. But you never could tell how a child would react—even a grown one.
Don’t look behind you. Why did that still stick in my mind? Where else had I heard it before?
Then I knew.
With an anticipation I hadn’t felt in six weeks, I reached for my pocket PC that I’d carried in my purse since Dean had given it to me for Christmas to track the family schedules. Brody had helped me put the scriptures on the device, but I had rarely used them, always preferring the feel of a book in my hands. Now I was grateful to have them with me.
Betty Jones must have seen something in my face; she fell silent and pulled out a colorful, half-finished afghan from the bag on her lap.
I clicked to Genesis thirteen and began reading.
Chapter Eight
Wind whipped sand into my eyes, and I was grateful for the wool cloth draped over my mouth. The hot sun beat down from above, and underneath my plain tunic and head covering, I was drenched in sweat. Up ahead I heard the call to stop.
“Sodom lies ahead,” a woman next to me said, pointing down the gentle slope we’d been following. “Many people dwell there.”
In the distance I could barely make out a walled settlement, full of homes made of mud bricks, the roofs covered in palm fronds. Most of the structures were only one story, but a few rose as high as two.
“There’s a marketplace,” said the woman with admiration. “We will trade well. Master Lot is wise to bring us to this place.”
I followed the woman and helped her pass food to the men and then to a large group of wide-eyed children. She told them we were almost at our destination.
I couldn’t believe they were going to Sodom. Didn’t they understand how dangerous it was? Surely the city’s reputation preceded it. I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t. Apparently, there was a limit to my participation.
After the short break the people and cattle began moving again. We were off the slope now, and Sodom’s innards hidden from sight. The walk was interminable, but the men, women, and children bore it with ease and few complaints. I seemed to be the only one having difficulty.
At last we stopped, and this time I helped the women unload the donkeys and pitch the heavy, black, goat-haired tents. I froze when Lot directed the people to face his tent in the direction of Sodom. Tears trickled from my eyes, already stinging from the desert sand. Around me, Lot’s people cheered.
“I am pleased that my husband chose to go with Master Lot instead of following Master Abraham,” the woman of earlier said. “Else we would not have been so close to a city as prosperous as this one.”
Hindsight would reveal that Lot had not made a wise decision. No student of the Bible was ever surprised when God later destroyed the sinful city with brimstone and fire.
Abraham, I knew, would settle in Hebron, where he would build an altar and offer sacrifice unto the Lord. Years from now, he would even save Lot from captivity and refuse reward from the king of Sodom, not willing to associate with such wickedness. Later still, he would be given a promised child by his beloved Sarah.
I was certainly in the wrong place. Here was Lot, his family, and herdsmen facing, yearning, longing for a city of known evil.
What a fool, I thought scornfully. Doesn’t he know that it’s only a matter of time before his children are drawn to the children of Sodom? Only a few years until they become so entrenched that nothing will be able to save them?
Not even an angel.
Helplessness engulfed me. Why was I here? Surely I was still back at the hospital receiving my treatment, reading the story that had come to life before me. I willed myself to wake. I knew exactly what came next, and I didn’t want to be there for it.
Sands around me shifted until I was standing in what appeared to be a mud brick house with a low ceiling. Lot was talking to several men, who made no show of hiding their mockery.
“Up,” Lot said, “get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.”
The men refused. Lot left them, and I followed, listening to the mocking lau
ghter filling the house and trailing after us. We pursued a narrow alleyway for some time until he halted at another mud brick house. A woman met him at the door. “Good husband, give me thy tidings.”
Lot shook his head, his shoulders bowed, and she seemed to crumple in on herself. I bit my lower lip as I watched her tears fall.
I knew we were in Sodom then, and that Abraham had already asked the Lord to save the city for the sake of the righteous. Surely, he’d pleaded, there were at least fifty righteous people in the city. Yet the Lord could not find fifty righteous people, so Abraham’s plea dwindled to forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, and then at last ten. Finally only his nephew Lot and his family were to be spared.
But Lot’s sons-in-law mocked the word of the Lord and their father and would not be saved. Lot put his arms around his wife and mourned with her.
I sat on a stool nearby and watched the heartbreak around me. I knew Lot now regretted coming to Sodom. He finally understood the danger he had placed his family in, and there was no heart left in the man to go on. I knew exactly how he felt. It wasn’t easy knowing that everything—or almost everything—was lost.
I stumbled out to their small courtyard and fell to my knees. “Why, Father? I don’t understand.” For long moments I prayed, seeking an answer. There had to be some connection between all these experiences I was having and my own life. But what? Darkness fell, and I slept.
The sun had not yet completely risen again when I heard a commotion in the small house. I went toward the sounds.
Two angels in the form of men were in the main room with Lot and his wife. “Arise,” one said to Lot, “take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.”
Lot lingered still, and the angels took hold upon him and his wife and two daughters, bringing them out of the city. Laden on donkeys were all their worldly possessions. Tears made paths down our cheeks. Lot’s wife had the look of a woman who had lost all that she held most dear.
The Gift of Angels Page 5