How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  “Better than I’ve slept in months.”

  Her body was warm and fragrant against his. He could see the widow’s peak of her damp hair, spiraled up in the towel. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get over it,” he said.

  Ruth looked up. “Over what?”

  “Over the fact you married me.”

  She winked. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

  He stared down at her and set the flipper on the island behind them. “I won’t,” he said. Then he leaned down and kissed her again. It was a kiss that lingered and grew until the burning pancakes on the griddle set off the cottage’s smoke alarms.

  Chandler John Neufeld Junior reread the letter to his wife, put his head in his hands, and began to weep. He was cracking, and he knew it. He should’ve never left the hospital. Even if it’d gotten bombed, even if he had died there in the bed, it was better than slowly starving to death while moving around the lifeless city like a ghost. His isolation came down to fear. He’d had minimal human contact in the past few weeks, but he was beginning to understand he was never going to make it unless he took the risk of letting others know who he was. So it was either die from starvation or die at the hands of an unknown terrorist who could use his videoed death to evoke fear in American hearts. But whatever he was doing now was not going to work. Determined to get home, Chandler stood, folded the letter to Ruth, and slid it into his pocket.

  He descended the building’s crumbled steps and walked out into the city. He’d attempted to travel at night, where he could skulk in the shadows, mostly unseen. But his debilitating hunger had driven him out, seeking food over safety. After so many days of traveling in darkness, the stark sunlight burned his eyes. Everything was the same—white and ruined—everywhere he looked, so sleeping in one apartment complex was the same as sleeping in one twenty miles away. Chandler walked, his throat thick with dust, until he came to a series of structures that didn’t look as destroyed as the rest. He had no map, and even if he did, the blasts had destroyed most of the street signs and turned landmarks into dead ends. So he walked. He walked until the stranger’s ill-fitting shoes formed blisters on his heels.

  A dog barked somewhere, a man yelled, the sound of gunfire rebounded in the distance.

  Chandler looked up, which had become habit for those who were unfortunate enough to get rained on from bombs in the sky. Nothing was there. The color was a disarming clear blue. Chandler’s inability to think clearly prevented him from seeing the man coming around the corner with an AK-47 across his chest. He yelled at Chandler in Arabic. Chandler instinctively raised his hands and backed up. The man yelled some more, his great bull chest heaving inside his black T-shirt. It appeared to Chandler like the blackest shirt he had ever seen, since everything around the man was an impressionistic depiction of gray and brown, the buildings that remained splashed with graffiti the color of blood.

  “Sorry!” Chandler said. “I’m sorry!” though he knew not what he was apologizing for.

  Now this man would know he was American. But the man didn’t seem to care. He just pointed at Chandler, pointed at the road, and then struck the butt of the gun with his ringed hand. The sound clanged inside Chandler’s head like a bell. The nonverbal communication did the trick. Chandler knew what the man wanted—and what he didn’t. Chandler backed up farther, his hands still raised, and didn’t dare turn around until the man—satisfied he was leaving—stepped back into the ruins.

  Only once Chandler was safe in an alleyway, wishing for darkness, did he begin to wonder how he could’ve become this person who searched for food amid rubble and wore a dead man’s clothes. Chandler no longer had any idea where he was going; the destroyed streets were a maze with no destination, and yet he would continue walking until he could walk no more, envisioning his family at the end, though he was beginning to doubt his return.

  Elam and Ruth didn’t eat their pancake breakfast until noon. Instead, for those hours, they remained tangled up in bed, listening as the sun warmed the earth enough to cause slabs of snow to slide from the tin roof. Elam rested one hand on Ruth’s stomach. Her body enamored him, and not just because he’d never been with a woman before. She was soft and yet strong—a combination which reflected her soul as well. Ruth was marvelously unselfconscious, laughing as he studied every inch of her skin, as if she were not just an artist, but her own work of art.

  “What happened here?” he asked, tracing a thin white scar on her shin.

  “The neighbor boy threw a rock at me and told me to go away. I was six.”

  “He probably liked you.”

  “He sure had a funny way of showing it.”

  “And here?” He ran his thumb over her knee.

  “Rollerblading with a friend from high school. I wiped out on the hill.”

  “What about this?” Elam picked up her ankle, examining the tiny vertical scar.

  “Nicked it shaving,” she said. “There was a piece of skin in the razor.”

  Elam winced. “My mother and sister never shaved.”

  “Not that you know,” Ruth said. “The other week, I caught Laurie wearing a mud mask.”

  “A mud mask?”

  Ruth couldn’t stop laughing. Trying to explain the mysteries of the female life put them into perspective. “It’s this green mud that you put on your face to make yourself beautiful.”

  Elam still cupped her ankle. “And you do this?”

  “Not often,” she said. “But yes. I have.”

  The fire had gone out by the time the newlyweds cleaned up the kitchen and got dressed.

  The cottage was cozy but would feel cramped if they didn’t get some fresh air soon. Ruth put on the thermal hiking gear she had bought in preparation for the trip, but Elam just wore pants, a long-sleeved collared shirt, suspenders, and his coat. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t get cold.”

  “Must be nice,” she said, “living in Wisconsin.”

  They trudged out into the snow, and it seemed strange to Ruth to be on a walk without Zeus loping at her side or one of the girls tugging at her hand, dragging a blankie or a doll.

  “Do you miss them?” he asked.

  “My girls?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do. This is the first time I’ve been away from them.”

  Elam didn’t say anything. She felt him looking at her. “You and Chandler never went away?”

  Ruth shook her head. “An orphanage requires a lot of babysitters, so there was really no one left to watch the girls. Plus, Chandler had a hard time leaving the clinic.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Elam reached for her gloved hand with his bare one, and the two of them walked along the lane, past the apple trees someone had planted a long time ago. Half of each trunk and half of each branch were etched with snow, showing which way the wind had blown. Ruth glanced over at their shadows, traced across the untouched white. She clutched his hand and pointed. “Look,” she said. “That’s us.”

  CHAPTER 13

  CHANDLER FOUGHT OFF EMOTION as he walked toward the structure, charred and pockmarked with bullets like so many others, but one of the most majestic images he’d ever seen: the American embassy in Kabul. He pulled himself forward, each step a battle between collapse and will. Impassive soldiers stood before the gates with M16s strapped across their chests. The one man looked at Chandler without turning his head. The other didn’t spare him a glance, as if he’d seen grown men cry one too many times. The second soldier patted him down and let him in. Chandler was grateful he’d discarded the knife he’d found at the ruined apartment complex.

  More guards were inside the building, as silent and still as the ones outside. A woman stood behind the desk. Her red lipstick and coiled black hair made Chandler feel he was looking at an avatar from some other time. She addressed him as she saw him, in Farsi.

  Chandler shook his head. “I am American,” he said, and with those words, he knew—for good or for i
ll—there was no going back.

  For four glorious days, Ruth and Elam enjoyed the newness of their life together. The TV sat in the corner like a dull gray eye because they never turned it on. They didn’t go to restaurants, to the movies, or to the many art galleries in town. Instead, they stayed where they were—tucked in their cottage with the stained-glass windows and gray tin roof. They kept the fireplace roaring and prepared and ate meals by candlelight. They bathed together in the narrow clawfoot tub, with Elam’s knees jutting over the lip and water sloshing onto the floor. Hand in hand, they walked to the candy cane–striped lighthouses placed like chess pieces over the island, and Ruth filled her coat pockets with the shoreline’s smooth, egg-shaped stones.

  She and Mabel had agreed that Mabel would call every two days from the phone in the barn, leaving Ruth a message so she would know the girls were all right. Otherwise, Ruth’s phone would remain off. The first message had been a cheerful update saying the girls were eating and sleeping well, though Sofie had complained her knees hurt the previous night. The second one, yesterday, had been an update saying the girls had helped make spritz cookies and then cut snowflakes from construction paper and hung them all around the house.

  Meanwhile, real snow fell and then thawed, and then fell again, quilting the ground so it would’ve been impossible for Ruth and Elam to drive away from their cottage if they wanted to. But neither of them wanted to. At night, before they fell asleep, Ruth fantasized about living there forever. She could create art and sell it at one of the galleries in town, which catered to summer and fall tourists. Elam could farm cranberries here, or apples, or cherries, or any of the hardier crops that kept the farmers surviving, if not thriving, all year round. The two of them could live, love, and die while existing as each other’s axis upon which their worlds spun.

  But then Ruth thought of her daughters in Mabel’s care, and her fierce love for them realigned all rational thinking. She couldn’t stay here, as much as she wanted to, because Sofie’s growing pains were a sign she missed her mother. Two-year-old Sofie started having growing pains in earnest once she understood Ruth would drop everything and sit on the couch and rub her kneecaps with lotion until Sofie either fell asleep or her bottomless love tank filled. Growing pains were Sofie’s orphaned heart crying for attention, and if Ruth did not return soon, she knew the ground she and Sofie had gained would begin to slip away.

  Two days after arriving at the embassy, Chandler stood under a hot shower, marveling at the commonplace miracle until the water grew cold. The first day at the embassy, he’d spent being interrogated; the second, filling out paperwork. He knew from a few secondhand accounts—mostly inexperienced tourists who’d been pickpocketed overseas—that losing one’s identification papers was more than just a hassle, but he could’ve never anticipated the amount of red tape that’d have to be cut to return someone to the States.

  Chandler couldn’t understand what the holdup was. Ruth had often informed him he leaned toward some rather naive thinking, but he thought one call to Physicians International, and he’d have his one-way plane ticket home. It was not working out that way, and as he rinsed the lather from his scarred body, he refused to contemplate why.

  An hour later, Chandler was dressed and seated across from a suited man who looked at Chandler like he was a terrorist. “You claim you are Chandler John Neufeld Junior,” he said, his Southern accent lengthening the vowels, “and you work for Physicians International.”

  “Yes,” Chandler replied. “Yes, that is right.”

  The man looked down at a paper. Chandler hated that the other side of the table was too far away to read what it said. The man’s face hardened, his pencil mustache an accent mark above his flat mouth. Chandler didn’t know what else to say, so he looked at his hands, fingers interlocked. “Well, Mr. Neufeld,” the man said, “we’ve been in contact with the director of Physicians International, and he says that Chandler John Neufeld Junior died during a July bombing raid in Kunduz, Afghanistan.”

  Chandler’s throat tightened. “That—that can’t be right,” he said. “I was in the hospital for months. I was very badly burned, you see, and maybe—maybe they didn’t know I was alive.”

  The man shook his head, made a tsking sound Chandler knew should invoke his silence. “No,” he said. “Chandler Neufeld’s death certificate was processed on July 17, 2018.” The man studied Chandler. Chandler forced himself to hold his gaze, to look neither surprised nor devastated, though he was both. Did Ruth believe herself a widow? Did his girls believe they were fatherless? His heart sank as pain sprang to his eyes. The man continued, his stone face unsoftened by a dead man’s tears, “If Chandler Neufeld is dead, sir, then who are you?”

  The stone-faced man allowed Chandler to make one long-distance phone call, as if he were in prison. He called Ruth, of course, to explain the unexplainable: that her deceased husband was still alive. His pulse beat in his throat as he dialed her number. By heart, he thought. What a strange term for numbers in your mind. It went straight to voice mail. Her message was condensed now, nothing like the rambling one she’d had when they first started talking. Back then, it’d made him smile to listen to her voice; sometimes, when he’d called her in Ireland, he hoped she wouldn’t pick up so he could hear that indefatigable cheer of hers, that breathless “You’ve reached Ruth Galway’s cell phone! Sorry I missed you! Please leave your name and number, and I’ll be sure to call you back. Have a great day!”

  Now, the message simply said, “You’ve reached Ruth Neufeld. Please leave your name and number, and I’ll call you back.” It wasn’t just that her voice had deepened as she’d gotten older, which it had; it was the timbre of the voice itself—weariness and resignation had replaced the exclamation points and cheer. When was the last time Chandler had listened to her voice? Truly listened? He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d left a voice mail. Their last few months together, their communication had been reduced to texts, devoid of pronouns, punctuation, and emojis: Home late, Get milk, Supper at 6.

  Chandler cleared his throat, aware he was being watched by the stone-faced man, who didn’t seem to believe his story. He stared at Chandler as if he might begin talking in code.

  “Hey, Ruth,” he said. His voice broke, splintered, and the tears he’d been holding back leaked through the cracks. Only then did the man have the decency to look away.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Chandler. I’m alive, love. I’m sorry it’s taken me all this time to reach you.” He couldn’t speak anymore. He hung up, for his quiet crying had turned into sobs, as if Ruth had been the one presumed dead and not him. But his resolve to speak had been derailed by that phrase, “I’m sorry it’s taken me all this time to reach you.” Because that was what had happened. It had taken being stranded in a city built of ghosts to realize how much he needed his wife and daughters. He would not take them for granted again.

  Ruth powered her cell on in the morning to check for Mabel’s final message about the girls. The honeymoon’s bliss was countered by Ruth’s concern for Sofie that grew each day she was gone. She walked out on the porch and sat on the swing, wrapped in the tartan blanket she and Elam had slept on in front of the fire—the two of them spooned together on the rug, Elam’s arms around her all through the night, the way Ruth had always imagined married couples slept when she was a teenager awakening to such ideas and yet had never experienced before now. Ruth’s anxiety eased, thinking of this, of her new husband who was inside, making oatmeal and coffee while humming a melody Ruth recognized from the classical station they’d listened to on their way here.

  The white apple flashed on the black screen, and Ruth’s phone made a dinging sound. Ruth looked at it and saw she had two voice mails. She didn’t recognize the first number but saw it was from Kabul, AF. Assuming it had something to do with the bombing, Ruth decided to listen to Mabel’s message instead.

  Ruth smiled. Her mother-in-law’s accent was stronger over the phone, but perhaps the same could
be said of Ruth’s. The girls were happy, Mabel said. They’d generously saved two of the spritz cookies for Ruth and Elam and had taken Everest, the new puppy, out for a walk. No doubt, Mabel would be exhausted when the couple returned, and Ruth was grateful Laurie had watched the girls in the afternoons to give Mabel a little break. Ruth pressed Play on the second voice mail. She held the phone to her ear, absently staring out at the snow.

  There was so much static in the message that at first, she wasn’t sure what—or whom—she was listening to. But then the man started crying. She could hear that clearly. Ruth sat up straighter on the swing, and her heart began to pound before her mind could think, as if some soul-deep part of her understood before the rest of her did.

  Chandler.

  It was Chandler, her husband, crying on the other side of the line. Ruth dropped the phone. It skidded across the porch and landed in the bank of snow pillowed over the straw-like perennials she had admired when they first drove in. The sound zapped her awake. She scrambled off the porch and grabbed the phone, which hadn’t sunk into the snow as much as it had slid down the embankment. She wiped the case off on her robe and looked to see that the strange number that marked her husband’s voice was still there. She walked back onto the porch and stood there, shivering, as she pressed Play. Chandler’s voice again, and this time she could distinguish his words: “I’m alive, love. I’m sorry it’s taken me all this time to reach you.”

  Ruth glanced over her shoulder toward the cottage, as if she had anything to do with her dead husband’s reappearance. For this is what he was to her: a dead husband. He was no more alive, although she heard his voice, than the plants that needed pulled or cut away before fresh ones pushed up for another season. Chandler was not a part of her life now. He was not a part of the lives of his girls. He’d made that choice when he chose his “calling” over his family.