How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  The same power take-off just as easily, and unsentimentally, removed Elam’s finger, and though he knew he should be grateful it hadn’t taken his whole hand—or, worse, his life—the removal of that single digit almost seemed like God was pointing a finger at Elam, declaring that his years of subterfuge had finally received their comeuppance.

  Elam played and played in the cabin. Since he’d never learned how to read music, he played the melody by heart. He closed his eyes and leaned into the song. After all this time, his maimed hand could find the keys just as effortlessly as his whole one. He finished and tilted back, unsure if the sun or the moon would be shining through the window when he opened his eyes, and almost relishing if it would be darkness, since the darkness would feel sacred, hushed.

  But when he opened his eyes, the clouds must’ve shifted, for sunlight poured through the windows, revealing the haphazard piles of hardback books on the floor. He was rested, rejuvenated, his head buzzing with endorphins, and he absently wondered if this was how Ruth felt when she completed her runs. He smiled at the image of her: Ruth’s right leg kicking out slightly farther than her left; her strawberry-blonde ponytail swishing back and forth with her uneven strides. He looked around the cabin and wondered if she’d ever had a place as magical and as secluded as this was to him, and he could suddenly see her here—not with him, perhaps, but on her own, pursuing her gift, even if no one else ever knew she possessed it.

  Standing from the bench, Elam closed the piano lid and strode across the room to blow out the lamp, which now seemed lit more for ambience than illumination. His head cleared and purpose renewed, he left his cabin and walked past the lake.

  He knew what he was going to do, and the thought of it pleased him.

  All day, Ruth kept looking between the house and the barn, wondering where Elam was but not wanting to ask. Her head pounded as she sorted cranberries—discarding any that were soft or malformed—and washed them in the basin. The repetition seemed the only thing that kept her on task. She’d barely slept last night, but just stared at the ceiling while replaying everything Elam had said.

  Ten years ago, she would’ve looked down on a man whose highest aspiration was to have a family. Ten years ago, at the ripe age of twenty, she would’ve sneered because, in her own mind, her aspirations were so much higher than that. She planned to change the world as soon as she graduated college, and though it was unclear how she would accomplish such a feat, she knew a headful of dreams would take her a long way. Twenty-year-old Ruth did not know how marriage and children would factor into such dreams, but she did know she would not settle for anyone who did not believe as she did: that children produced by their union were brought along on the adventure; the adventure did not stop for them.

  But now, at thirty, Ruth had a different view. The adventure did indeed stop—or at least change—after children, and to try to deny that was like trying to deny the sun rising, or the days growing shorter in the fall. Children initiating change was an undeniable factor of parenthood.

  Ruth had learned to accept this concept, because she knew it was the only way she could endure. Chandler, on the other hand, continued to live as if his family was a fixed point on the spinning compass of his life. Therefore, hearing Elam’s commonplace dream had filled her with a desire she hadn’t felt in years. Even now, it made her flush, recalling how she’d wanted to kiss him in that cranberry barn, and the utter travesty of this: a recently widowed woman finding herself attracted to another man. A man who was related to her husband, no less. So when Elam hadn’t appeared at breakfast, and then later hadn’t appeared at lunch, she began to worry. She didn’t worry that something had happened to him; she worried that something had happened to them, and that last night, Elam could read that fevered expression in her eyes.

  “You feeling okay?” Laurie asked.

  Ruth glanced over. “Yes. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve been . . . quiet.”

  Ruth thought about saying she was always quiet—Laurie was often the one who spoke—but she didn’t want Laurie prying further, so she just nodded and continued sorting.

  Three hours later, the workers were taking a lunch break when Ruth spied Elam striding across the field. She was sitting on an overturned crate and eating a slice of apple and cranberry pie Laurie said hadn’t looked pretty enough to take to the party. When Ruth saw him, it was as if a trapdoor opened and every conceivable thought fell through the gap. She looked down at the bite of crust balanced on her fork and saw her fingers were trembling.

  Ruth glanced at the farmhouse. Mabel was pushing Vi on the tire swing Elam had hung from an arm of the tree last week. Sofie was throwing leaves on Zeus, so only his head and wagging tail protruded from the pile. She wanted to go to them. She wanted to gather them up and hide behind motherhood because that was safer than embracing her place as a woman.

  Ruth swallowed her last bite of pie. “Okay if I check out for the day?”

  “Oh, sure,” Laurie said. “We’re almost done here.”

  Ruth stood and crossed the field. Elam stopped walking. He looked at her for a long, silent moment and then quickly looked away. “How’s the . . . sorting coming?” he asked.

  “Fine. We’re almost done.”

  “Good.” Elam nodded methodically. “That’s good.”

  Ruth shielded her eyes with one hand. “What were you up to today?”

  “I was in the . . . woods.”

  “Oh.” That single syllable conveyed all her disappointment. What was she thinking? Elam was already making attempts to avoid her: a widow on the prowl. “I—I think I’ll get a taxi to take us back to Chicago soon,” she said. “And then maybe we’ll catch a flight from there.”

  “You’re leaving?” Elam squinted at her, crinkles folding the skin around his eyes. “Why?”

  “It’s just time.” Ruth gestured over to the barn, to the women and men getting up from their lunch perches to resume their work. “Especially now the harvest’s wrapping up.”

  “There’s more work here for you, if you . . . need it.”

  Ruth smiled tightly. She heard in his voice not the desperation he was trying to hide, but his indomitable goodwill. Widowed or not, Ruth and her daughters would never be someone’s charity project. “That’s okay,” she said. “I am sure I can find work in Greystones, too.” Her words were like signing a check with nothing in the bank. She wanted to keep Elam from realizing how needy she was, but she could never go through with such plans.

  He nodded, looked down, and kicked at a flat stone near his boot, sending it end over end across the rich earth. “If that’s what you . . . want,” he said.

  Tears pricked Ruth’s eyes. She looked away. “We’ve put you out long enough.”

  He stared at her until their eyes met. She watched the ruddiness gather in his face. The cranberry workers were heading into the barn. Elam turned toward her. He kneaded the muscles on the back of his neck.

  “Do you mind taking a walk . . . with me?”

  Ruth murmured, “I’d love to,” and they began moving over the field toward the wood’s unfurled edge. Their afternoon shadows touched as they stretched across the land.

  Elam’s mother, Marta, had been an artist, or as much of an artist as the demands of the farm and house allowed. She adhered to the wisdom of drawing inspiration from what she knew: bucolic images of the Driftless Region, the gold-and-green contoured hills covered in early-morning fog; pencil sketches of young Elam, his summer-tan bare feet crossed behind him and his cheek pinched in his teeth as he concentrated on his marble chaser as much as his mother concentrated on her artistry.

  As Elam grew, he noticed few mothers in the community took an hour or two every afternoon to transform a rusty saw—culled from the barn—into a wintry depiction of their farm at dusk. Or that few mothers used pieces of barn board to stencil their children’s silhouettes.

  Elam hadn’t appreciated any of these things until his mother’s absence made him
realize she was the one who’d painted all the color in their lives. Without her, the houseplants wilted and died; the windows smudged; the watercolors she’d been working on—before the cancer claimed her faculties—were slanted against the wall in her sewing room, where they would remain, the white canvas ocher-tinted by the years, until Aunt Mabel asked if her daughter-in-law and grandchildren could stay in Elam’s house.

  Elam contemplated all of this as he and Ruth strolled past the lake toward the cabin. They didn’t say much, but the quiet wasn’t uncomfortable. At least it wasn’t for him, though quiet was his default, so how did he know what was comfortable? Should he say something? He glanced over, but Ruth was looking straight ahead, her profile covered in sunlight, so the freckles on her nose and cheeks stood out against her pale skin. She was beautiful to him. He supposed he should feel guilty for that as well as for the feelings this beauty evoked. But he didn’t. Elam found beauty in the berries floating in the flooded bog; in the blue heron, earlier, skimming the water with its wings; in the fish jumping into the air before slipping back beneath.

  So why could he not also appreciate the beauty that was so apparent in her?

  Elam gestured toward the cabin, partially hidden by the trees. The entire area was a lavish palette of oranges, reds, and browns. “This,” he said, “is my home.”

  Ruth’s expression shifted in surprise but she said nothing. He let her walk up the steps first, and then moved around her to open the door. Elam heard her inhalation and knew this was the moment she took it all in. Elam, since he was a child, had collected items he saw as treasures: antler sheds, birds’ nests, pieces of glass he had wound with copper wire and suspended in front of the window so he could see the sun’s reflection as he played his music or read.

  “Do you play?” Ruth glanced up at Elam while running a finger along the piano top.

  He shrugged. “A little.”

  Ruth laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “I’m just so shocked.”

  “Why?”

  Her face grew somber, and he could see the lines around her mouth. Laugh lines, he thought, drawn on her skin during an earlier, happier time. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I assumed—” She stopped speaking, perhaps afraid of offending him.

  “You assumed someone who works with his hands can’t appreciate the finer things too?”

  Ruth looked down. “I’m sorry.”

  He drew closer, wanting to alleviate her distress, even though it had been self-inflicted. “It’s all right,” he said. His heart hammered as he took Ruth’s hand, reaching for her as someone would reach for another in the dark. She flinched, and then her posture eased. Her fingers did not return his grasp, but she did not pull away. “I want you to use this space,” he said. “For your studio.”

  “My—my studio?”

  Her skin was so soft. Elam had never taken a woman’s hand before, not like this. Middle-aged and he’d never experienced a touch that could evoke such emotion. “Yes, your . . . studio,” he said. “Didn’t Virginia Woolf say every woman needs a room of her own?”

  Again Ruth’s eyes widened. “Elam Albrecht,” she said, “you are a marvel.”

  Elam smiled. A wave of sunlight broke through the window and poured into the room, washing away the neglect. “I’m a simple man,” he said, “who appreciates . . . simple things.”

  Ruth’s hand moved. Elam steeled himself for her to pull away, but instead her fingers tightened around his. She stepped toward him as he’d just stepped toward her, the ancient floorboards creaking despite their carpet of dust. She looked up into his eyes, and he saw the tears gathered in the corners of her own. “You appreciate,” she said. “That’s what matters.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE DAY CHANDLER NEUFELD’S FUNERAL SERVICE was held in Wisconsin was the same day he realized he was still very much alive. Chandler was sleeping in the hospital’s safe room when the first bomb struck. A steady percussion followed that didn’t stop for thirty minutes, although Physicians International had circulated their GPS coordinates to every side engaged in the fighting. Window glass exploded into shrapnel. Drywall crumbled to dust. Intensive care patients burned in their beds. Pandemonium mounted as the bombing did not stop. Outside, in the early-morning darkness, the white, rectangular hospital appeared to be studded not with windows, but with a series of square, amber stones reflecting the writhing lives trapped within.

  The first bomb landed in the operating theater. Chandler Neufeld Senior, two years from retirement, was instantly killed, as was his assistant and the severely maimed soldier whose odds of survival were, ironically, just beginning to rise.

  His son, Chandler Neufeld Junior, should’ve been in the operating theater beside his father, for the pair worked better together than apart. But Chandler Senior had pulled rare paternal rank and required that Chandler Junior get a few hours of sleep before he reentered the theater. Chandler knew his exhaustion posed a threat to his patients even more than a threat to his own deteriorating health, and for this reason alone, he changed out of his bloodstained scrubs, set his cell phone alarm for 4 a.m., giving him three hours of sleep in the past two days. He awoke after the first bombing, as did everyone inside the hospital who was not killed on impact. His confused thought process took precious seconds he did not have to spare. His first thought was of his father. His second was of his wife, Ruth, and their daughters, Sofie and Vi.

  These thoughts created an internal war that mimicked the external one erupting around the facility: if Chandler attempted to save his father, his fellow staff, and their patients, he would more than likely lose his life. This loss would most keenly be felt by Ruth, Vi, Sofie, and his mother, Mabel. And yet Chandler Junior was there for the same purpose as Chandler Senior: to make a difference in as many lives as he could. Adrenaline coursed through him as he rose from the cot and opened the door, running toward the operating theater in his bare feet.

  The cement floor was hot and gritty with ash and debris. Putrid smoke stung Chandler’s nostrils as he passed the corpses of former patients, seared to their beds. Flames cavorted around him as luckier patients ran in the opposite direction, out of the fray. Above Kunduz, cruising in the clouds, an AC-130 gunship dropped another load. This sixth bomb, the same as the others, fell through the August sky like an early, innocuous Christmas parcel until it slipped through the roof gap the second and third bomb had made.

  The bomb did not drop at Chandler’s bleeding feet, or this story would have played out differently. Instead, it fell four rooms over. The detonation was the loudest sound Chandler had ever heard, and as if it were greedy to retain its place, he didn’t hear anything after it. He was thrown—just as the other patients and staff members were thrown—twelve feet to the left. He could’ve landed on an exposed beam or a cracked metal bed frame, the latter of which would have acted like a spear, and this story would have played out differently. But he didn’t. Instead, by a miracle if you’re a person of faith, or by happenstance if you’re not, he did not land on the broken metal bed frame but on the hospital mattress. It was barely enough to cushion the blow, but it was something. Chandler would have gotten up from that mattress with a mild concussion if the seventh bomb had not fallen. This bomb did not have the same impact as the previous, but the percussion caused a burning piece of roof to collapse, which pinned Chandler to the bed.

  At that moment, Mabel Neufeld was sitting in her recliner in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, reading a mystery novel, and her daughter-in-law, Ruth Neufeld, was softly singing “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra” while putting the girls to bed in her parents’ house in Greystones, Ireland. In the strange inconsistency of life, Mabel yawned and turned a page, and Ruth leaned over the bed, and then the crib, to give her daughters each a kiss. Neither woman’s heart stopped or skipped. No lights flickered. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that the older woman was a widow and the younger was on the verge of becoming one. Mercifully, Chandler Junior also did not know this, or at least his
body did not know this. His soul was more than aware of the changes taking place, but the soul does not fear death like the body does, and so he was in a place of peace, regardless of the outcome.

  The volunteers found him in the rubble when the literal smoke cleared. They sent the surviving patients to a neighboring hospital and evacuated the surviving national and international staff members. Chandler, when the bomb fell, was not in possession of his scrubs, his passport, his cell phone, or anything else that might identify him as an international staff member. Instead, he was garbed in a khaki tunic and pants, an outfit he’d purchased at an open-air market and which, unfortunately, placed him as a civilian. His dark eyes and skin—inherited from his mother—would also have placed him as a civilian if his features could have been distinguished from his burns. The fact that he was found barefoot near a hospital bed seemed to point in the direction of a patient. Chandler would have told the staff differently if he had known, but his face was so deeply burned, he could not talk. He could not think. All he could do was float in a haze of unconsciousness, tethered by the fact that he’d promised his wife and children he would return.

  Some say such promises make no difference. But Chandler’s spirit and flesh knew differently. His promise was what was keeping him alive. He would go back to his wife and to his daughters. He would find them, even if it was easier to surrender to the excruciating pain. This promise saved his life, but it also changed everything.

  Mabel suspected something had happened between Elam and Ruth because of how they acted during supper. They were quiet, for one, which was nothing new as far as her nephew was concerned, but Ruth often carried the conversation, playing a game with the girls that she called “favorite day”—asking them about their favorite moments from the day and sharing the minutia of hers—perhaps in an attempt to help them forget who was missing at the table. But tonight, Ruth was silent. She and Elam sat at opposite ends, and Mabel noticed they didn’t make eye contact. Mabel saw this because she was so intensely watching them that Sofie’s dark eyes flashed her a haughty, admonishing look. “You shouldn’t stare,” she said.