How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  Mabel lowered her eyebrows. She considered telling Sofie she also shouldn’t correct her elders, but she’d long ago decided that, if Chandler ever settled down long enough to produce some offspring, she wouldn’t be the kind of grandma who divvied out punishment like her own grandmother had done, so that Mabel, at sixty-five, still couldn’t use a wooden spoon without mentally calling it a “spanking stick.” No, she wanted to be a soft, cuddly grandmother who was remembered for spine-aligning hugs and a perpetual supply of molasses cookies dispensing condensation under a glass dome next to the stove. For the past few weeks, she’d finally been able to put these dreams into action. She loved having her grandchildren near. All their smiles, sticky hugs, and sassy ways were balms that soothed the ache in her grief-stricken heart.

  Mabel knew her daughter-in-law would not stay on the farm unless she had a reason to remain, and now maybe that reason was here. Mabel didn’t want to contemplate her motivations too long, for fear she was being selfish by silently rejoicing in her seat. Was it normal to want to encourage a union between your nephew and your widowed daughter-in-law? Mabel suspected it wasn’t, and yet whoever defined normal didn’t have black-eyed and blue-eyed grandbabies sitting at the table, who had been merely names she daily prayed for but who had no real-life connection until death stepped in and intersected their lives. Now, Mabel would do anything to keep them near.

  Anything, apparently, included wanting Elam and Ruth to wed.

  Mabel took a bite of mashed potatoes. No doubt they were delicious, for everything she made swam in butter, but tonight, Mabel could barely taste her food. She was too jittery with excitement, which made her heart thump hard, as it had when she received the news about her husband and son, killed when the roof caved in, as if she were living out a modern adaptation of Job. But this was a good thump. She looked between Elam and Ruth, and then from Ruth to Elam. Yes, definitely, she thought. Elam’s and Ruth’s eyes had just met, and Ruth blushed so hard, the red seeped into the roots of her hair. The funny thing was that Elam was a blusher too. Mabel remembered how this had upset him as a boy. He’d liked to portray himself a stoic, that his emotions were all buttoned up, but he could never quite pull it off with that telltale skin.

  Mabel cleared her throat. “Did you have a nice day off?” She directed this question at Elam, but right away, Mabel could tell she should’ve prefaced the question with his name, since the poor man being addressed hunched over his steaming plate of pork and sauerkraut, head down, as if being served a home-cooked meal was some strange form of punishment.

  Ruth said gently, “Elam, your aunt asked you a question.”

  Now his head popped up. Mind you, his ears might not be tuned to Mabel’s voice, but they were sure tuned to Ruth’s. “Wha . . . what?” he asked.

  “Mabel asked if you had a nice day off.”

  He nodded vigorously and looked at Mabel. “It was . . . nice,” he said. His color deepened, and his spine curved back over his plate.

  Mabel, feeling a little ornery, turned to Ruth. “And how was your day?”

  Her daughter-in-law was in the middle of taking a sip of water. This bought her a little time, but not nearly the amount of time she was taking. “It was . . . great,” she said.

  Mabel smiled and took another bite of potatoes.

  Sofie whined, “Nobody asked me about my day!”

  Vi smacked the table with her patty-cake hands. “Me day too!”

  Ruth looked at her daughters. “I’m sorry, girls,” she said. “I’m just a little . . . distracted.”

  Sofie’s face collapsed. Her bottom lip protruded from the rubble like a spoon. Two perfect tears rolled down two perfectly round cheeks. She whimpered, “I want to go home.”

  Even Vi went quiet. Pushing back her chair, Ruth moved around the table, lifted her older daughter from the chair, and sat her on her lap. She cradled Sofie there, though the child’s lanky legs dangled over hers. Sofie, at first, struggled to get down, but Ruth continued holding her until Sofie surrendered to the steady pressure and became nearly boneless in her mother’s arms. “Which home do you miss?” Ruth asked, and Mabel understood what she really wanted to know: What home could you miss? We have no home. We haven’t had a home in a long time.

  Sofie burrowed her head against the warm, familiar slope between Ruth’s chin and shoulder. It had been Sofie’s favorite spot as a baby—one of the few spots where she stopped crying, a slobbery fist twined in Ruth’s long, wavy hair. “The home where Daddy was,” she whispered, and this time Vi did not need to parrot her sister’s sentence for the entire table to hear it. The fully grown grief in those childish words sank like a knife in Mabel’s overworked heart.

  MAY 14, 2017

  Dear Chandler,

  Believe it or not, I do try. I do the laundry and dishes, pick up the house, make sure supper is ready before you return from the clinic, though I’ve reverted to Crock-Pots since it’s nearly impossible to predict when you’ll get home. I set out puzzles and books, even Play-Doh if I’m feeling particularly adventurous. I try to keep the girls occupied so that, when you come in the door, you’re not entirely overwhelmed. But then the rice burns, filling Bethel House with the scent of stale popcorn; our angelic daughters begin wrestling over a toy until someone cries.

  Displaying impeccable timing, this is often when you enter, and I am scraping charred grains of rice into the trash can. Every one of my efforts gone up in smoke.

  “How was your day?” I ask, trying on a smile for the first time since you left.

  “Good,” you say. Would it gut you to reply beyond one-word answers? Do you know what it’s like to not speak to another adult all day? But no, I think, you wouldn’t know that because you have a “career.” You wear green scrubs that garner respect and people call you Doctor. All I hear is “Mom!” in every possible form. Mom. Mama. Mother. Moooom. The last usually followed by “Come wipe me.”

  If only you could be so lucky as to have a job like mine.

  But I am lucky. Remember the first time Sofie called me Mom?

  She was two before she spoke, and she called you Da-da first. I ached to have some sort of compensation for the life I was pouring into her. And then, finally, I heard it. Mom. She wanted something—probably a piece of whatever I was eating—but I remember how I cried and cried and held her against me, until her little round body wiggled to get away.

  But now, now, I cringe every time I hear that name, remembering when I was once called Ruth—or even better, love, by you.

  So, you came home, after I’d been busy keeping your children alive all day, and said, “Good.” Do you know what it would’ve meant to hear you say, “Good, love. How was yours?”

  And then to have you listen as I shared about our daughters’ squabbles, Vi’s constipation, the exquisite yet monotonous moments that have composed my days for the past four years? But you didn’t. You brushed past me without a kiss. When did we stop that, Chandler? Brushing lips, touching hands? When did we become two ships passing in the night, and sometimes I don’t feel like we pass each other. I feel, instead, that we’re existing in separate harbors, and I’m not sure I know how to get to you, or that I even want to try.

  You went into the living room, stepped over your children, and pulled your laptop from your bag. I am sure you had to write up some report that would be turned in to Janice, who would then turn it in to the government, proof that the orphanage is doing right by the abandoned children the government had left on the streets, like dogs.

  I am sure this is what it was.

  But my jaw clamped tight to see you stepping over your daughters like they were misplaced toys. You sat down on the sagging sofa and powered on your laptop.

  Sofie heard you, then. She lifted her head and let Vi escape, the doll Vi wanted held like a trophy in her small hand. Vi is accustomed to your behavior, for she’s only known the restless version of you, which has magnified itself over the past two years. But Sofie remembers a different you—the hands-o
n dad, who took his role as a husband and father seriously.

  She remembered this tonight, and she ran. Instead of opening your arms, or closing that blasted laptop, you instead turned your legs to the side to avoid her collision. You guarded your laptop with your arm, as if it were your greatest treasure, and that was the moment something inside of me just . . . snapped.

  “I am with them all day,” I shouted. “Would it kill you to play with them for the first ten minutes that you’re home?”

  You lifted your eyes to the ceiling, making a pointed reminder that we have neighbors, the Pickerings, who are filled with the same hopeful enthusiasm I had when I first came here. I couldn’t have cared less about shielding their ears from our domestic plight. “Please don’t yell,” you said in your rational doctor voice you use when dealing with irrational patients.

  “I am not yelling!” I said, my voice rising even then, and I hated feeling like I was losing control. “I just think if you poured half—no, a quarter—of the energy that you use on your patients into your family, you wouldn’t be able to recognize your own life.”

  You looked at me, your long fingers poised over worn keys; the gold wedding band, which I’d slid on your hand four years ago, flashing like a decoy.

  “What’s happened to you?” you asked.

  I slammed the empty rice pot down on the counter. I turned to you, to this restless version of you that I can barely recognize. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  Chandler had no idea the remains belonging to an Afghan soldier named Shahid Khan were buried in Wisconsin, and that Chandler John Neufeld Senior and Junior were legally declared dead. He had no idea he was in an intensive care unit in Kabul, Afghanistan, or that he’d made the four-hour trip by ambulance, which was like riding on a rickety buckboard. Instead, his mind drifted as morphine moved like blood through the parched tributaries of his veins. Chandler was back in the airport in Bogotá, where he’d last seen his wife and daughters. It was early morning, and the flower vendors were setting up their roadside stands. Chandler parked the battered van he’d borrowed from the director, Janice, and helped Ruth and the girls inside.

  Dew clung to the vendors’ tissue-wrapped blossoms, and the cloying scent of roses filled the air. Chandler looked at one bouquet as he passed, remembering how he used to buy from another vendor near the orphanage when he and Ruth were dating. But when Ruth noticed him reaching for his wallet, she said, “Don’t. My hands are already full.”

  His hand dropped. Ruth scraped Sofie’s hair into a ponytail. Fine curls were cropping up around the child’s face from the light rain that had christened them on their way inside. Chandler helped roll the suitcases up to the check-in station, and then stood back with the girls while Ruth printed off their boarding passes. The airport was crowded for four in the morning: an elderly man, dapper in a pressed suit, held the hand of a little girl in a frothy dress the same green as the bouquets’ tissue paper. A teenager openly cried while hugging an older woman with waist-length hair. Two hikers in tired, earth-toned clothes carried backpacks they would surely try to cram into overhead bins.

  Everyone did indeed revolve around the still point of his family.

  Staring down at his beautiful daughters, and then over at his beautiful wife, he questioned his choice to remain in Colombia while they went to Ireland on their own. Maybe he could fly over in a few days, once he got things settled at the orphanage and his luggage packed for Afghanistan, but then Ruth returned with the three boarding passes. She looked at him, and her eyes were blank of emotion, which revealed the depth of emotion taking place within.

  “Say good-bye to your daddy,” she said, swinging Vi up on her hip. “We need to go.”

  Tension radiated between them, but Chandler didn’t know how to address what needed addressing, and Ruth seemed beyond conversation as it was. Instead, they hovered around each other, each of them rooted to a child, who clung to their legs.

  Chandler touched Ruth’s back. “Let me know when you get there,” he said.

  She nodded and looked at the gate. Vi reached for him. He took her from Ruth and hugged her tight. She clasped his neck with her hot, dimpled hands. Chandler’s eyes welled. Clearing his throat, he kissed Vi and passed her back to Ruth.

  Sofie immediately pressed herself against his legs. “Come with, Dada,” she said.

  “Baby, you know I can’t.”

  She looked up at him then—big brown eyes brimming—and he felt like the worst father in the world. How could he be out of his children’s lives for six months? How could he leave his wife to deal with all that was ahead of her? Ruth, no doubt, was asking herself these same questions, and he hated that she felt abandoned by him while he was still standing right here. And yet, she knew his dreams before she married him; she even encouraged him to obtain them.

  But all of that changed once they had children.

  Afterward, Ruth changed. Her need for adventure was replaced with her need for a nest; her need for spontaneity replaced with her need for stability. Chandler perfectly matched her former self, but the motherhood version did not so easily match him, and he felt this; she felt this; Chandler was sure the children felt this too, for even if Ruth and Chandler did not openly fight, the strain between them was palpable, even to a five-year-old and a toddler.

  Chandler had already hugged and kissed his daughters, and therefore the last person he had to say good-bye to was her. Ruth. He looked at his wife and suddenly had a vision of the first time he saw her at the orphanage. He was crossing the stone courtyard when he heard children’s voices, harmonizing with the bells marking the half hour. It was a song he’d never heard, sung in a language he could not understand. He walked toward the room and saw Ruth, standing at the front of the classroom while waving a piece of chalk like a conductor’s wand. She had long, wavy hair and freckled skin. She wore a peasant top with a shin-length blue skirt and ballet flats. Chandler was not the type to notice a woman’s appearance, much less her clothes, but he found this woman intriguing. She noticed him standing in the doorway and smiled.

  It was a warm smile that forced the recipient to smile in return. He was no exception. A few of the children noticed him there as well and stopped singing to look. But he was a fixed junction on the unsteady track of their lives, and therefore he was beneath the rapt attention they paid the new teacher. Still, Chandler didn’t want to disturb the class more than he had, so he stepped backward, out of the cool classroom doorway, and before he’d finished crossing the courtyard to his office, he chided himself for not checking to see if there was a ring on her hand.

  Chandler compared that woman to the one standing before him in the airport. Five years of sleep deprivation, for Sofie still had night terrors, showed in the pallor of Ruth’s skin and in the dark circles ringing her eyes. He wanted to tell her he was sorry he wasn’t the man she needed him to be, and that life seemed difficult for her of late. But he didn’t want her to view this confession as a final effort for intimacy, and he wasn’t sure how it would be received. Therefore, he just leaned forward and kissed her. The kiss was perfunctory and landed near her mouth rather than on it. It seemed they’d been kissing each other like this for years. Where was the passion of yesterday? The few weeks after they were married, but before they adopted Sofie, that they could send each other walking swiftly back to Bethel House with just one look?

  “I love you, Ruth,” he said, his voice a whisper near her ear.

  She turned her head away from him, and he could see the sheen of tears in her eyes. “Love you, too,” she said. “Just come back to us, okay?”

  Lying now in the hospital bed in Kabul, he wondered if this request was for more than just his physical return to their family, but for his emotional return as well. He knew Ruth was not the only one who’d changed with the years. He told himself he was an excellent father to his girls, and he was, when he could be there, but he was no longer an excellent husband. They had drifted apart, and he could not pinpoint exactly why or
when that drifting had happened. All he knew was that his first glimpse of Ruth in the classroom, teaching orphaned children a Gaelic nursery rhyme, was one of the images he was going to conjure forth to help him recover. And then he was going to return to his children and his wife.

  Splashes and squeals nearly drowned the sound of Mabel reading the now-censored Eloise Wilkin Stories to the girls as they played in the bathtub. In the kitchen, Ruth cleared the table. Elam plugged the sink, squirted dish soap into the rising water, and used one large paddle hand to work up some suds. Ruth came over with a stack of plates, set them on the counter on his left-hand side. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t even quietly hum like he usually did when he was cleaning in the wake of Mabel’s latest kitchen upheaval. Ruth didn’t say anything either.

  Four hours ago, he’d touched her hand.

  Next, Ruth brought over the tray crowded with mason jars of varying levels of water. Elam couldn’t stand it anymore. He turned to her, lifted out his foamy hands to take the tray. She stared at the center of his chest. There was about a foot between them. Chandler had been the same height. Elam wondered if Ruth thought of this when she stood next to him. Or in front of him, like now. But it wasn’t fair to any of them to think this way.

  “Are you okay?” Elam asked.

  To Elam’s surprise, and perhaps Ruth’s, her fierce determination not to cry wasn’t enough. “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m not okay. I don’t know how to help my daughter.”