How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  “Sometimes,” Sofie said, “I wish Daddy was here.”

  Ruth kissed the top of Sofie’s head and hugged her even tighter, remembering the first time Director Janice had placed Sofie in her arms and declared her a mother. Ruth never wanted to let Sofie go, never wanted to loosen her grip. It was as if she’d hoped her encircled arms could protect her daughter from all the horrors of the world and never once thought that, sometimes, those protective arms could keep a child from experiencing the world at all. “I wish he was here too,” Ruth said, and she was surprised to find that she meant it, for her daughters’ sakes, if not for her own.

  Fourteen weeks after Chandler almost died in the bombing, his lungs cleared from the smoke. It startled him, this sudden ability to breathe, so he didn’t realize how bad off he’d been until the nurse reversed the intubation and that ability returned. His voice box felt wrapped in sandpaper, each swallow like shards of glass nicking his throat. But he was grateful. Each small step to full recovery meant he was moving closer to communicating who he was and how the hospital could return him to his family, where he belonged.

  Chandler had passed the weeks since his morphine tapered off enough to make him aware of his surroundings—and of his boredom—by mentally composing a letter to his wife. He’d mentally composed and discarded so many drafts, he had every jot and tittle of the entire composition memorized.

  Dear Ruth, it began.

  I keep thinking about how, when we were first dating, I waited to tell you I loved you until after you moved home to Ireland and we were continents apart. And now here I am, lying in a hospital bed with nothing on my mind but you, and we are, once again, continents apart. What blinds me to the value of what I hold until I’ve almost lost it? I miss you, Ruth. You’d think I would miss the big moments—our first kiss, our engagement—but instead I miss the small ones: the girls coming to our bed on Sunday mornings with their blankies and stuffed animals; having to move all their mermaid Barbies to the back of the bathtub so I can take a shower; you somehow destroying the kitchen by making macaroni and cheese; eating dinner together as a family and talking about our “favorite day.” I never really played along, did I? In the favorite-day thing. The girls would say they loved drawing on the walls or playing with rocks, and I would just mumble the first thing that came to my head because I didn’t see much in my life to be grateful about. Well, I am grateful now.

  When I look back on these years, I have to wonder if our marriage would’ve been easier if we hadn’t become parents right when we became husband and wife. But God must’ve planned it like this, knowing that, out of all the volunteers, you and I would find little Sofie on the mountain that night, and he would give us the grace to love this child, even when she acts like she finds it next to impossible to love us back. I imagine—no, I know—that you have sacrificed so much more than I have to mother Sofie and Vi.

  Day in and day out, you are surrounded by two little people who need you like air. Meanwhile, until this point, my life has kept on much as before: an endless cycle of work, eat, sleep; work, eat, sleep, and somehow, I fit you and the girls around the edges of my days. I didn’t understand, until it was perhaps too late, the value of what I held. Forgive me, Ruth. I promise, if I get to return, I will hold you and the girls close, forever.

  All my love,

  Chandler

  CHAPTER 9

  ELAM ALBRECHT DIDN’T HAVE MANY NEEDS. Even in winter, he could live in this cabin without running water and be content. However, the idea of leaving Ruth and the girls in his farmhouse while he remained out here seemed wrong. As strange as it was, they felt more like family than the extended family he’d always known, and to leave them would be to leave an essential and vibrant element of his life, which he hadn’t known was leached of color until it returned.

  He didn’t think he could do it. But not to leave meant Laurie’s other suggestion, and he didn’t think he could do that either. Not because Elam didn’t want to marry Ruth and be a father to her daughters, but because he feared she wouldn’t want him. That her heart was still Chandler’s and would be until the wounds, inflicted by her grief, healed.

  Was it any wonder he wasn’t getting anything done? Was it any wonder he knew his entire life hinged on this decision?

  Elam left the cabin and looked across the field toward the house. Mabel or Ruth had turned on the kerosene lamp, and sheets of light unspooled from the windows onto the grass. Sighing, he knifed fingers through his hair and walked between the channel and the lane. Zeus gamboled along beside him, and Elam looked down at the dog. He hadn’t been a fan of Zeus when he first arrived, his canine breath fogging up the passenger window of Ruth’s rental car while Vi, who—unlike the person she was greeting—never met a stranger, leaned around him to wave at Elam. But now the dog had become an extension of Ruth’s family. Elam couldn’t imagine them without him.

  “You think I’m a fool, huh?” Elam asked. “For even thinking it’s a possibility?”

  Zeus looked up at him and cocked his massive head, as if afraid to tell the truth.

  Sighing again, Elam climbed up onto the porch. “That’s what I thought.”

  When Elam and Zeus entered the house, Vi squealed and ran for the door. Elam realized the child was eager to see her dog, not him. But the little girl still bestowed Elam with a smile, even if she partially shielded her eyes with her left hand. Zeus’s floppy ear was clutched in her right, so the long-suffering dog couldn’t move his head. Elam knelt and covered his eyes too. Giggling, Vi spread her fingers so she could peek back at him. He leaned forward and gently poked her belly. She leaped back—thankfully releasing the dog—and squealed again. Elam stood and saw Ruth sitting on the bottom step, looking up at them. “How was your day?” she asked.

  He swallowed. “Long but . . . good,” he said. “And yours?”

  Ruth stood, glancing over her shoulder toward the kitchen, and then down at Vi, who was too busy grooming Zeus with her brush to pay them any mind. Lowering her voice, Ruth confided, “Actually, it was awful. Sofie had a meltdown earlier.” She exhaled. “I guess I did too. I haven’t disciplined her since Chandler died. Not because she hasn’t needed it . . . but because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t emotional when I did punish her, and here . . . I completely lost it. I hit her, Elam. In anger.” Ruth hung her head. “It was one of the worst moments of my life.”

  Elam moved toward Ruth. The dim light from the kitchen shone on their backs as the man who rarely spoke prepared to speak because Ruth needed him to reassure her more than he needed his insecurities. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But you need to know one thing right now, Ruth, and that’s that you’re an amazing mother. Those girls are blessed to have you in their lives, and even if they’re not aware right now, one day they will be.”

  In the foyer’s protected darkness, Ruth leaned forward and rested her head against his chest. Elam’s heart thumped so hard, he was sure she could hear it. He let his arms come up around her and held her against him. She rested there—the two of them outlined by the frame of the door—and he knew, as she surely did, that what they had here was not merely friendship.

  “Ruth,” he said and took her hands, rubbing them between his cold ones, and he marveled that touching her was becoming as natural as touching his own skin. “Ruth, I . . . I . . .” He stopped talking, not knowing how he could continue, and yet not knowing how they could continue—living like this—if he didn’t at least try to explain what he felt.

  But then Ruth put a finger to his lips. Taking his hand, she placed it at the base of her throat. His palm spanned her breastbone. A fingertip brushed each clavicle. He could feel her heart beating there . . . beating just as hard as his.

  NOVEMBER 5, 2017

  Dear Chandler,

  Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if you and I had been husband and wife for a few years before becoming parents. Would we have gone to restaurants? Or backpacking? Would we have somehow slipped away from the orphanage long eno
ugh to plan a trip overseas? And not the kind of trip that required us to pour into others, but the kind of trip that would have allowed us to pour back into ourselves . . . pour back into each other?

  Instead of waking up early to give Sofie her bottle, would you have woken up early just to look at me? Would I have woken up early to bring you coffee and cream in your favorite mug? Would we have read newspapers side by side in our matching pajamas and gone out for brunch?

  We never had the chance to experience any of these things, since Sofie needed us so desperately in the beginning, as desperately as she needs us now. Reactive attachment disorder. I didn’t even know what that was back then until Director Janice told us. I just knew that whatever I had was not enough, and I could not mother Sofie the way she needed.

  You knew her, though; somehow you did. I would be exhausted, one hand dangling over the bassinet next to our bed, so that I could still touch her in her sleep, and you would come in, and you would scoop her up against your chest.

  You would whisper sweet nothings into her ear and rock her back and forth in front of the barred window—the moonlight passing through it divided into parts. I loved you then, and I hated you. I was so young, I guess, which explains some of my immaturity. And yet, I was still your bride, your newlywed, but I felt like neither. I instead felt like you and Sofie were trapped in this bubble, and I was the one on the outside, desperately trying to fight my way in. I wondered, in those ugly, exhausted moments, if you truly loved me, or if you only married me because you loved Sofie and knew you could not take care of her and take care of the other orphans too.

  To this day, all these years later, I see you with our girls—your dark eyes gleaming with tears behind your glasses—and I wonder, deep down, if you love me the way you love them. I know this is my own insecurity rising to the surface, but I cannot help comparing myself to Sofie when she first became ours: reactive attachment disorder. It doesn’t matter how much you hold me, I can never allow my heart to open wide enough to accept—or give—love.

  “I am an American doctor.”

  This was Chandler’s first audible sentence, after his throat healed from the smoke damage and weeks of intubation. The nurse didn’t understand him, not because he didn’t speak English, but because Chandler could still only whisper. After he did understand what Chandler was communicating, it didn’t make much difference.

  Chandler had no identification, and many civilians around Kabul would’ve claimed they were the kings of England if it meant getting out of the country alive.

  Chandler rasped, “I need to speak with someone from the American embassy.”

  The nurse shook his head. “You can’t.”

  Chandler tried to sit up, but even that small, ordinary movement set his skin on fire.

  “What do you mean, I can’t?”

  “There is no American embassy.”

  “No American embassy?”

  Again the nurse shook his head. “The ambassadors evacuated a month ago.”

  Chandler didn’t know if he should believe him, or if this was the response he gave to all the civilians who believed they had a special case. After the nurse left, Chandler tried to get up again, tried to block his mind from the pain so he could focus on what he wanted most: getting home. He swung his legs over the bed. Weeks of bed rest, with little to no therapy, had atrophied his muscles beyond recognition, and he knew his legs were the least affected by the burns. What would Ruth think when she saw him? The wave of pain following this thought was so intense, Chandler’s mind switched off to endure it. He did not feel his body colliding with the floor, or the nurse calling for backup, or the morphine, once more, entering his vein.

  Ruth couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed with Sofie asleep beside her, Vi asleep in the crib, and Zeus sprawled out on the floor, his heavy breathing as patterned as a white noise machine. She imagined Elam downstairs, in the small room off the kitchen, struggling the same.

  From the beginning of life after Chandler, Ruth’s greatest goal had been to keep a semblance of normalcy for her girls. She feared she’d betrayed that goal tonight by allowing herself to remember how it felt to be touched by a man. Like so many aspects of life, Ruth understood she had one shot at this. Motherhood. Child-rearing. Turning babies to girls and girls to women who could also survive if faced with the unthinkable. While stumbling through the maze of her grief, Ruth could not lose sight of the fact she had to help her daughters find the way through theirs.

  After the unthinkable happened, and Ruth came back to herself enough to understand that she had to explain what had happened to her girls, she got around Cathleen Galway’s “no internet from 9–7” rule by staying up late googling “How to tell your children about death.” She could only read the content on KidsHealth by first fortifying herself with a glass of wine:

  When talking about death, use simple, clear words.

  Listen and comfort.

  Put emotions into words.

  Tell your child what to expect.

  Talk about funerals and rituals.

  Give your child a role.

  Help your child remember the person.

  It had only been a week since Ruth received the call from the Physicians International staff member, and yet she had failed at the majority of this list. Her eyes burned from the laptop’s blue glow. Her babies were already sleeping in her old bed upstairs, cuddled together beneath the fringed canopy, because Ruth couldn’t bear to sleep without a hand touching them, as if to reassure herself—even while she dreamed—that her children weren’t gone too.

  Closing the laptop, Ruth swilled the rest of her wine. She prepared to go to bed when she noticed her mother in the kitchen, tossing half the contents of her spice drawer into the bin.

  Ruth asked, “Mom? You okay?”

  They each mourned the loss of their spouses, but—the same as in everything else—they went about it in different ways: Ruth Google-searched; Cathleen organized.

  Cathleen said, “Some of these spices expired when you were in high school.”

  Ruth noticed her mother hadn’t answered her question. Ruth walked into the kitchen and stood with the counter against her back. Cathleen had curly salt-and-pepper hair she kept cropped no-nonsense short. She’d once favored blazers and dress slacks, which accentuated her sharp features, but now she preferred khakis and her dead husband Kiffin’s hand-knit fisherman sweaters, which still retained the scent of stale pipe smoke.

  Cathleen and Kiffin were opposites in all the ways that mattered and in all the ways that didn’t. For the most part, they had complemented each other, rounding and chipping until their lives became a mosaic, if not quite a cohesive whole.

  But standing in the kitchen, listening to the faucet drip, Ruth saw that her mother didn’t know how to live without her husband, and so she did what she did know how to do. By this point, Kiffin had been dead for three months, and every nook and cranny of the house had already been culled: his magazines and books, loafers and corduroys given to the thrift shop in town; his dog, Zeus, sent to sleep in the garage rather than at the foot of his master’s bed, like he’d done for the past five years and his canine predecessors had done before him. It was as if Cathleen were trying to remove all proof of her husband’s existence and, with it, proof of her pain as well.

  But it hadn’t left. Ruth could see that as she observed her mother rigidly lining up the few spices that remained, parallel to one another; little soldiers confined to a drawer. Ruth had never done well being confined, and they had butted heads most of her life.

  “Everyone keeps asking me that,” Cathleen said. “If I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Ruth whispered. “I just want—”

  “I know what you want.” Cathleen tossed another spice. “Closure. Healing. Acceptance. But I can’t do that right now, Ruth. I can’t dig up all the hurt and sift through it, trying to make it all better again. That’s not how it works for me.”

  Ruth nodded. They never talked about how eith
er of them was faring again.

  Far removed from that Greystones kitchen, Ruth turned over in the bed she shared with Sofie. The Wisconsin moon was bright against the blinds and split through them, as if to peer at those sleeping inside. Careful not to disturb her daughter, Ruth got to her feet and looked out. In the distance, the lake shone like a polished plate. The channels were thin strips framing the drained cranberry bog’s shadowed bowl. It was magic, this simple place, and for the first time since Elam took her hand, she let herself imagine how it would be to make this farm her home.

  If she weren’t a mother, would the decision to let Elam love her be so hard? She honestly didn’t know. For six long—occasionally blissful—years, Ruth had sacrificed to take care of others, and if it weren’t for Sofie and Vi, who so desperately needed her, she wasn’t sure she could enter an arrangement where her independence would be sacrificed again. And yet, she remembered Elam’s gift. Her art studio. A room of her own when she didn’t have a roof to her name. This thoughtfulness touched her in a way few gifts had, and she knew it was more than a gift to her. It was proof Elam wanted more than the fulfillment of his dream for a family, but that he also wanted to make her own dreams come true.

  Ruth, aware she was not going to sleep, walked downstairs in her yoga pants and sweatshirt. The flagstone sidewalk was cold beneath her bare feet. Her breath twisted up into the night sky. The seasons were changing. After having lived for so long in Colombia, the air-conditioned capital of the world, she anticipated the shift and wondered if this was a sign that her life season was about to change as well. The thought thrilled her, and then guilt set in that she could rejoice in a new season when the old meant her children still had a father.