Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  I hold up the box. “Just taking back something that was already mine.”

  “You better not have touched my stuff.”

  “Seth,” says Mrs. Catterson.

  “I saw your trumpet,” I say, “but I didn’t touch it. I don’t even know how to play.” When Mrs. Catterson ducks into the pantry, I whisper, “Your stuff smells bad.”

  “It does not.”

  “Does not what?” says Mrs. Catterson, shuffling back into the room in her shoe-socks.

  “Why did you let her into my room?”

  “Why am I getting sass?” says Mrs. Catterson. “Is that what you’d like me to discuss with your father when he gets back?”

  “Thank you for letting me spend time in your room,” I say to Seth in my nicest voice.

  Across the table, my table, he glowers at me. I think about the fact that I might be the closest thing to a friend he has, this boy who spends the whole day here alone with his mother, doing homeschool things and waiting for his father to get back from fundraising trips. But knowing I should feel bad for him makes me, at this moment, hate him even more.

  “How about a ‘You’re welcome, Charmaine,’” says Mrs. Catterson.

  “You’re welcome,” Seth mumbles, but whispers, “not welcome, not welcome, not welcome,” when Mrs. Catterson slips out again.

  Phoebe picks me up in the Pinto, which is repaired for now but coughing blue smoke. When she slows down to shift gears, as she always does, we stall in the middle of Main Street. Once she gets the engine going again, she tells me she’s been thinking hard about our visit to the recovery center together, how good it is that I’m getting the chance to see the situation for myself. “I really can’t shield you any longer from what your father’s going through,” she says.

  There’s this thing that happens with her voice, like she can’t help being pleased to have something important to say. Even if the important thing is something bad for everyone.

  “I know what he’s going through,” I say, and then there’s the thing in my voice that responds to the thing in hers. That makes her say things like: “Right; there isn’t much you don’t know these days, is there?”

  The lit-up cross still shows in the passenger-side mirror, smaller and smaller in the distance, and I focus on it while I roll down the window. The air smells like wet leaves.

  “Must you?” Phoebe says.

  I don’t answer and she sighs, then rolls down her window too. The air has a chill for this early in September, and soon I am cold, but I won’t roll my window back up because that would be admitting I shouldn’t have rolled it down in the first place. I wrap my arms over my chest, careful not to wince in front of her.

  “Had enough?” Phoebe says, rolling up her window. “Colder than you thought, isn’t it?”

  “It feels great,” I say, and lean my head out into the air.

  “You’re going to make yourself sick,” Phoebe says, and we ride in silence for more than a mile. Then she knocks her elbow into mine and says, “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Remember how I used to come into your bedroom and tickle you at night? Remember how you and I used to be best friends?”

  I tuck my elbow into me as close as I can. We’re approaching the gas station Tracy Payne lives behind. It’s still open, and tonight there’s a truck at the pump that hides most of the cinder-block house in back. I like that Phoebe doesn’t know I’ve been over to Tracy’s. I like that she has no idea about any of the three county people God laid on my heart for Operation Outreach. That she doesn’t even know there is such a thing.

  “I know your father’s written to you about not hearing the voice of God,” Phoebe says.

  The rain has picked up and I am getting wet, but I don’t want to be sealed up in the car with Phoebe, snaking down to the river at twenty miles per hour, when she’s talking about my father.

  “You want to know what I want to know?” She hits the steering wheel with the heels of both hands, then grabs it hard. “What I want to know is, when is it my time to question something? When do I get to say, ‘The voice of God told me to do this,’ or ‘The voice of God told me to do that’? When do I get a break from my responsibilities to figure out what’s the voice of God and what’s a chemical imbalance in my brain?”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “What’s stopping me?” She sighs. She’s been slumping and now she draws herself up, braces herself against the wheel. “I don’t like the spirit of your question. Your attitude. But the question in itself isn’t a bad one. But even taking myself out of the whole equation . . . let’s just say, for example, that I don’t get to wonder the same things your father does. That I, as the Apostle Paul himself suggests, have been put on this earth just to listen to and believe anything my husband, your father, as the head of this household, says about God. Are we really supposed to overhaul our lives again and again based on communication no one else is privy to and for no other reason I am given to understand?”

  It gives me a bad feeling to hear Phoebe talk this way. “God told Abraham to kill Isaac,” I say. “Abraham was just supposed to obey. He didn’t have to understand.”

  Our headlights catch the edge of the short gravel drive to the cabin, and we turn in. “You forgot to leave the light on,” Phoebe says. “Again.” She cuts the engine and I roll up the window. “Hold on a sec,” she says. It’s dark enough down here that you can’t really see the rain, but you can hear it murmuring against the windshield.

  “Honestly, Charmaine, I try. I don’t hear the voice of God directly, but I read the Bible. I pray. I don’t usually insist on understanding. At times I have even allowed myself to feel special, like maybe God chose me to be with a person who hears the voice of God because I had some rare capacity, even a spiritual gift, to accept mysteries—like Mary, when she found out she was pregnant. I liked that God told your father to marry me. I felt important when God gave your father revelations. And then the fasting starts up. And I don’t know what to make of it, but your father’s an exceptional man, ‘a man after God’s own heart,’ as your grandmother likes to say. And whatever else may be wrong with him, I believe he’s sincere. And if God tells him to fast, who am I to say he shouldn’t? And he gives me the history of fasting and all the cultures that fast, and each time he goes off on a fast, I pray for strength. Because he always comes back with who-knows-what new idea. And I have done my level best to help this man run his life—and ours—by a voice he admits he can’t hear anymore now that they’ve slowed down his brain to what the doctors all agree is a normal pace. So what was he hearing all those years his brain was racing? Like someone whispering in his ear, he used to say. That’s what I’d like to know. Because other people, other Christian people I could name, thought it was pretty strange for God to tell someone with a family to quit an honest paycheck. What if we’d had an emergency? What if you’d contracted leukemia?”

  “I didn’t, though,” I say.

  “And the things he tells you. Hearing the voice of God, not hearing the voice of God. There are some things you simply should not share with children.”

  “You share a lot,” I say. “You share and share and share.”

  “Oh, you think so?” She reaches up and turns the rearview mirror to her face. “There’s plenty I keep to myself these days. You might be surprised.” Something about the way she moves her chin to the side and blinks at her dim reflection, like she’s keeping a secret with it, is new, and my heart lodges somewhere in my neck, thumping hard.

  “About Doctor Osborne?” I say.

  She adjusts the mirror to its original position, frowning. The darkness is lighter now, greenish, and there’s a moving shadow of the rain on Phoebe’s face. The drops hit the windshield, stick, and spread out a little, more like big dollops of pudding than like water. You can just barely see the shape each one makes when it hits the glass, before it disappears into the rest of the wetness. When she finally speaks she sounds less shocked and outraged than
I expected.

  “Morris, Doctor Osborne, is a brother in Christ, and there’s nothing wrong with a little support from a brother in Christ.”

  “What about support from brothers in Christ who aren’t bachelors?” I say. “What about sisters in Christ?”

  “Bachelors,” she says. “That sounds just like Daze. Doctor Osborne is a very brilliant man, Charmaine, with a Ph.D. Do you know what that is? We talked when he drove us home, and there is nothing in the world to hide about it. Doctor Osborne is a man of God, and I am a woman of God.”

  “A defensive woman of God,” I say.

  “That mouth of yours will get you into trouble.”

  I try to imagine Mrs. Catterson and Seth talking to each other this way, even when they’re mad. The loneliest thing about it is that there’s no way out, once it starts. I have to say the next mean thing or I feel like I will disappear.

  The rain is letting up, and I reach for the door handle.

  “I’m not finished with you,” Phoebe says.

  I try to let everything drain out of my face the way Kelly-Lynn does, all the irritation and bad attitude, but it’s hard. The irritation and bad attitude keep me from feeling scared, and it’s a fight to keep a bland, bored expression. It’s like I’m in water, and underneath are all the feelings, like bars of soap that want to bob up and break the surface. Only there are hundreds of them, and I only have two hands.

  “What’s the matter with your face?” Phoebe says.

  I blink at her and count the blinks: one, two, three. I tell myself that each of her words is like a single bird in a migrating flock that will soon be gone.

  “You want to know what Doctor Osborne and I talked about? We talked about how there’s more than one way to look at things. You can look at things like in biblical times, where God speaks to people right in their heads and tells them to do things like part the Red Sea or build an ark or slaughter their own children. Or live on faith alone. Or maybe—and yes, Doctor Osborne suggested this to me, so what?—maybe you can take the idea that God gave us the Bible for rules and our brains to figure out how to use the rules.”

  “Okay,” I say, “but God gives everyone brains. What happens when one person figures something out one way and another person figures the same thing out another way? How do you know who’s right if they’re both using their God-given brains?”

  Phoebe pinches the bridge of her nose like she has a headache. “My point,” she says, “the point I started to make, is that I am your mother. And the Abraham thing? You can’t tell me your feelings wouldn’t be hurt if I tried to sacrifice you. Things are different now, that’s all. Like divorce. We can look at it and say, What did divorce mean during biblical times, and what does it mean during these times?”

  The word divorce hangs in the air between us, delicate as a bubble. If I touch it, it will burst and cover everything.

  “Are you listening?” she asks. “What did I just say?”

  “Things are different now,” I recite in a singsong voice. It’s the unbearable voice of Little Marcy, the child narrator of Bible stories on a record I used to listen to before falling asleep. Only my Little Marcy voice is poisonous.

  Phoebe sucks in her breath. “I wish you could tell me what I ever did to you that you talk to me that way. When I most need you. Seriously, Charmaine. Families in crisis have to stick together.”

  “Isn’t Daddy your family?”

  “We’re all family. Even Daze is our family, if just by marriage.”

  “She’s my family by more than marriage. I’m her blood kin.”

  “Listen to you. ‘Kin.’ You’re picking up the way they talk down here. My point is about support.”

  “My point,” I say, “is that you’re the one talking about divorce, to another man, when your husband’s in the hospital. Is that what you mean by support?”

  Then she slaps me. I don’t see it coming, and her hand catches me full on the face. “When did you become such a little viper?” she says.

  The world stops for two seconds and then starts up again. I don’t feel like crying, not even a little. I feel calm. It’s easy to keep a blank expression now, and I wonder if this is how Kelly-Lynn feels all the time.

  Phoebe recovers fast. “I’m sorry.” She claps her hands over her own face. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Can I get out of the car, now?”

  “Yeah,” she says, which is a word she never uses or lets me use. She believes in “Let your yes be yes and your no, no.”

  A couple of fat drops catch me on the way in to the cabin. Phoebe stays in the car, and in the dark I fumble with my key and let myself in. It feels too late to start my homework, which I haven’t been keeping up with very well, anyway. I can’t even remember anything about school at this point, despite the fact that I spent the first eight hours of my day there. Titus is not inside. I see, with panic, that I have forgotten to leave the window over the sink open for him. I wrench it open now and call out. The only answer is the soft rushing of the river. I open the rest of the windows in the trailer and turn all the lights on so that he’ll know we’re home.

  In the tiny bathroom I stand in the shower to change into my nightclothes. I brush my teeth, wipe my nose and chin with witch hazel, and touch my reddened cheek. My eyes peer out from behind my face, serious and unfamiliar.

  Back in the main part of the cabin, Phoebe has already spread the narrow tweed couch with my sheets, pillow, and a blanket, which I usually do myself. She’s standing by the kitchen sink, looking out into the night and holding a plastic cup of water. Her face is wet.

  “I forgot to leave the window open for Titus,” I say.

  “He’ll be okay,” she says. She drains her cup then fills it again at the tap. “I don’t expect you to understand this. But I can’t remember the last time your father showed the tiniest bit of interest in anything I had to say. He’s never heard a gol-rammed thing over the voice of God. So it felt good to talk to Morris. Doctor Osborne. I’m sorry about that. That in itself is probably not okay to feel. Not when I’m a married woman. And if you don’t mind, I would really appreciate it if you didn’t tell your grandmother.”

  Phoebe downs the rest of her water and upends the cup in the drain. I crawl under the covers.

  “I know the two of you are close,” she says. “I know you tell her more than you tell me.”

  “I won’t tell her,” I say.

  “I’m coming apart,” Phoebe says. “I’m very sorry I raised a hand to you, but I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams.”

  Instead of washing up in the bathroom, instead of pulling the curtains and changing into her nightclothes in front of me in the way I hate, she climbs the built-in ladder to the loft, clothes and all.

  And because for once she hasn’t asked me for a good-night hug, hasn’t told me she loves me and waited for me to say it back, I feel like I could tell her, right now, that I love her. And I almost want to tell her. And to ask her to please not get a divorce. And not to come apart. And to say that it would make me feel bad, it would make me feel terrible, if she tried to sacrifice me. All of this swells up in me to say, but I don’t know what that would mean at a time like this, what else she might expect from me, so I keep it all to myself and turn out the light and dream that I’m a child again.

  Chapter 12

  IN THE MORNING, TITUS has still not come home. The rain continues slow and heavy, and I pretend to be asleep until Phoebe drives off for her Saturday errands in town. Then I pull on the homemade Levi’s and a dirty shirt and head outside. He’s probably holed up somewhere dry, under someone’s house or car. He might even be in one of those caves in the palisades, where my father has told me bats cling to the ceilings like furry, upside-down carpeting. You can get bitten by a bat and not even know it because their teeth are thinner than needles. Bats carry rabies, and Titus may or may not have had his rabies booster last year, because he was an indoor cat.

  I check the river first. Rain soaks through my clothes
right away and trickles down my scalp. But the wetter I get, the warmer it feels. When I step out onto our wooden dock, it creaks, pulling against the ropes that hold it to the stake my father sank deep into the garden. Today the river is a rushing brown froth, chopping up higher than usual against the edges of the bank, depositing things in the scrub and the low-hanging limbs of trees—twigs, a plastic bag, leaves. Nothing that looks like a dead cat, thankfully. I try not to look at the bridge high above, though my father says cats survive falls better than most animals. Something about how loose their bones are.

  “Titus,” I call, but in the rain the sound seems to die two feet in front of my face. I cup my hands to make a megaphone. “Kitty, kitty.”

  I hike back across the weedy lawn and start down the river road in the opposite direction of the bridge. If I were a Catholic, I could pray to a specific saint, maybe even a saint of lost cats. I wipe at the pen marks on my thumb. The earliest of them have already faded to pale blue. I am not good at prayer without ceasing, but I can hardly think how else to pray anymore, without suggesting to God that there might be things that are more important to me than him. Like my father coming home, like finding Titus, like everything going back to the way it was before. Maybe what I should be praying is for God to change my heart so that he really is more important than the other things, the same way he was more important to Abraham than Isaac was. Because when Abraham proved it by raising the knife to sacrifice Isaac, God didn’t take Isaac away after all. So I pray for that, quickly, before I start to worry about my ulterior motive. Then I pray for my three Operation Outreach people, that I’ll have better progress to share when I do see my father, so that he won’t despair of his vision for the county. Then I pray Inhabit me, O Lord God and try to muster up some perseverance, because with more than fifty hatch marks on my hand for effort, I still don’t feel inhabited, and even though I know it is sinful to pray with expectation, I definitely didn’t expect things to get harder the harder I tried. I wish there was a medicine I could take that would do the opposite of what they’re doing to my father—speed my brain up instead of slowing it down. Then maybe I could hear God’s voice, or at least keep on praying while I did everything else. I rub my hands against my jeans, scrubbing off the ink marks as best I can to make a clean space for starting over.