How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  Chandler brushed Sofie’s sweat-rimmed curls back from her face. “What is it, love?”

  Their daughter clung to him—to his shirt, to his hands, to whichever part of him was within her grasp. She clung and whimpered like a wounded thing, “I thought you were dead.”

  Chandler turned toward Ruth. Immense, immovable sadness sat like a boulder between them. This sadness had existed long before the bombs fell and the sky churned red, as if the stars themselves were burning. It had happened in tiny increments, in tiny decisions: the decision to choose someone else, or something else, over each other. These decisions were made with the belief that the other person would always be there. That there would be more opportunities to hold hands on the couch, to slow-dance in the kitchen, to tell her husband how capable he was, to tell his wife how beautiful he found her, even after the nights of child-induced sleep deprivation and deprivation, period, which could underscore the eyes with weariness, as well as the soul. It was not all Chandler’s fault, and neither was it all Ruth’s. The fault lay in the combining of imperfect selves that resulted in a vast separation of two people who were supposed to be one.

  Ruth crossed the room now and sat on the other side of Sofie. She glanced over her shoulder, toward Vi, and saw that the child was sleeping, like she seemed to sleep through everything. Vi was so lighthearted and easygoing; the complete opposite of her sister, and Ruth wasn’t so sure Vi took after her. Ruth stroked Sofie’s hair. Her hand brushed Chandler’s, and he drew it away. The sadness loomed; that boulder was immovable.

  After what seemed like an hour, Sofie came back to herself enough to open her eyes. She looked up at Chandler. Ruth could see her body relaxing as her six-year-old mind understood her father’s death was only a figment of some waking nightmare. Still clinging to him, she said in her guileless voice, “Can you and Mommy sleep in here, with me?”

  Chandler looked at Ruth, and Ruth looked at him, stricken by the fact they were both rendered speechless. Chandler wiped the tears from Sofie’s face and said, “Yes, I can sleep in here.” Sofie looked over at Ruth, awaiting her mother’s answer. Ruth did not want to sleep in here with Chandler. And yet, if that was what it took to make Sofie feel loved and secure, she could not say no. She nodded and Sofie sat up, wiping the tears and mucus from her face. If Ruth didn’t know better, she would think this entire drama had been contrived.

  So while Chandler held Sofie, Ruth went downstairs and fetched her pillow from Elam’s room, and the pillow on the couch Mabel must’ve gotten for Chandler before she went to bed. She gathered these, a few blankets from the cracked stone crock near the fireplace, and carried everything back upstairs. Sofie’s twin bed was against the wall and most of the other space was taken up by the dresser, changing table, and crib. Ruth shook out the blankets on the floor and tossed the pillows at the head. Sofie leaned over Chandler’s arm to look, and smiled.

  “See?” Chandler said. “We’re both here, Sof. We’re both going to be here all night.”

  Sofie nodded, satisfied, and Chandler kissed her before tucking her back in. Ruth kissed her as well and then sat on the pallet of blankets in her wool sweater and jeans. Chandler could not sleep fully clothed, and he peeled off his T-shirt and socks and lay down beside her. She didn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him, but remained staring at the ceiling.

  “Ruth,” he said. “Ruth.”

  She glanced down and saw him. Chandler’s chest, which she knew so well, was rippled from the burns. She might not like him—might not have liked him for a long time—but they were bound by law and by their children’s love, and it hurt to see the pain he’d endured.

  Ruth was not the only one who’d been forced to survive.

  She murmured in the dark, “Yes?”

  “No matter what,” he said, “we’re still going to be a family.”

  CHAPTER 16

  RUTH AWOKE TO THE FARMHOUSE ceiling above and the hardwood floor beneath her back. In the drifting haze between dreaming and consciousness, she had difficulty pinpointing this moment in the timeline of her life. And then she turned on her side and saw Chandler. He was still asleep, and so she studied him. She looked at his eyes, moving restlessly beneath their lids, and at the ink-black stubble that had thickened overnight, nearly covering up his scars. She studied the heartbeat pulsing at the indentation beneath his throat, and wondered how long it’d been since the act of making love with this man had seemed a true expression of love.

  When Ruth’s eyes shifted back up to Chandler’s face, she found him studying her to the same extent. They stared at each other in the pearled dawn, neither one blinking, that pulse thudding harder at the base of Chandler’s throat, and Ruth knew, like she always had, that he wanted to cross that chasm, though he made no move to touch her. But then Vi woke up and started whispering to her sister, who groaned in response. Ruth was grateful for the interruption, grateful for the chance to break off the unnerving eye contact with her first husband and instead be the mother to his children, a role she began preferring after Vivienne’s birth.

  Sitting up from the floor, Ruth pulled on the toe of Vi’s footie pajamas. Vi squealed and hung her head over the side of the crib, pale hair fluttering. “Mommy!” she cried. “Daddy!”

  Ruth laughed and stood to tickle her younger daughter. As she giggled and thrashed, morning sunlight streamed through the windows, the edges of which were laced with frost. The view beyond it looked like a winter scene from a pop-up book.

  From the kitchen, Mabel called, “Time for breakfast!” and the giggling girls screamed in delight. Chandler walked down the stairs, carrying Sofie, and Ruth followed, holding Vi’s hand. She watched her husband’s and her daughter’s silhouettes, and how they changed when Sofie rested her head on his shoulder, her small hand splayed across his back as if sheer force alone could keep him there.

  Mabel turned from the stove when they stepped into the kitchen. Her eyes filled with tears as she stood there in her tattered robe, a flipper—balancing a sunny-side-up egg—trembling in her hand. Then, with no words exchanged, they all sat at the farmhouse table with a centerpiece of pecan pancakes topped with butter cubes melting down the stack. Ruth cut up a pancake for each of the girls and reached for the pitcher to pour the maple syrup, which Elam had tapped and boiled. She froze a moment, staring at that pitcher, and thought of Elam out there in the cold, with no family around him, and probably with nothing warm to eat. She looked back at her two daughters, who were smiling in anticipation, and thought, Why can’t this be enough?

  “Can we pay in the snow?”

  Ruth looked down at young Vivienne. Except for their brief stint in Ireland, caring for Ruth’s father, her children had always lived in Bogotá. Until this winter, they had never played in the snow. They’d neither experienced a cold so fierce it takes your breath, nor the comforting thaw when you finally come inside. So after washing up the breakfast dishes, Ruth went upstairs and rooted through the girls’ things, piecing together a hodgepodge of items that would win no fashion awards but would at least prevent frostbite.

  Chandler helped the girls put on their layers and then sat them on the steps to work their feet into three pairs of socks. He held Vivienne’s bare toddler foot for so long—its tiny arch; its five perfect, pea-shaped toes—Ruth could see he was struggling not to cry.

  Chandler didn’t have any warm clothes, so Ruth went into Elam’s room. She didn’t allow herself to breathe in his earthy scent while she picked an outfit for the father of her children. It felt wrong—a double-edged sword of betrayal—to do something as simple as this, and yet this was what she was faced with: a constant battle between fulfilling her daughters’ wishes and fulfilling the desires of her heart. Those two things had become mutually exclusive, but they’d become mutually exclusive even before this time. For didn’t motherhood have a way of culling away a woman’s desires and returning her to duty? Wasn’t this, also, what caused so many marriages to implode, as that duty—that daily fight for survival—prev
ented husbands and wives from acting upon the desire which had created those children in the first place?

  Ten minutes later, the snow was stained pink from the dye in Sofie’s cheap gloves as she packed the dry flakes and lobbed the misshapen snowball at her father. Chandler darted and the snowball disappeared into a drift. Vivienne fell face-first into the snow and started to cry. Kneeling, Ruth scooped her up and brushed the snow from her cheeks, stretching Vi’s hand up to the sky as more flakes fell. Chandler came over to check on them, and Sofie came over too.

  He knelt before his younger daughter. “You okay there, girly girl?”

  At the nickname, an expression of recognition rose like dawn on Vivienne’s face, and when she smiled at Chandler, Ruth could see she wasn’t just smiling at a kind man who doted on her and Sofie; she was—for the first time since Chandler’s return—smiling at her dad.

  Ruth’s heart swelled with joy. She turned toward Chandler, grinning with affection, which also shone in her eyes, and he leaned across the drift and kissed her. His lips were warm; his face against hers was cold; snowflakes melted where their skin touched, appearing more like teardrops than snow. This time, she did not want to move away.

  After Vivienne, for the second time, fell headfirst in a drift, and Chandler tried to teach Sofie how to do a snow angel, only her coat didn’t have a hood, and the snow slid down her neck, the shock of the cold making her cry, the parents gave up and each carried a child up to the house.

  Mabel had the forethought to spread old towels in the foyer for their wet shoes. Chandler helped Sofie out of her layers while Ruth helped Vi. The girls ran off, into the kitchen, and Ruth and Chandler were left to fend for themselves. Chandler must’ve noticed how fast Ruth was unlacing her boots, for he said, “I’m sorry about what happened . . . outside.”

  Ruth nodded, tugged off her damp wool socks and balled them up. She couldn’t think of an appropriate response. In that kiss, in that physical token of love they’d exchanged so often out of habit, she found she was still attracted to Chandler, and yet she couldn’t admit this without desecrating her relationship with Elam, which wasn’t old enough to have made a habit out of anything. So she said nothing. She just looked at Chandler, standing there with his wet hair curling over Elam’s jacket. He had always been a handsome man, and Ruth could recall a time in her life—years of her life, in fact—where she didn’t want to be anywhere but with him.

  However, that was back when he didn’t want to be anywhere but with her too.

  Thankfully, from inside the kitchen, Ruth heard Sofie crooning, “Mom-my, Dad-dy; Mom-my, Dad-dy.” Ruth listened to the lyrics of that song, and then she looked over and met Chandler’s eyes. Such sadness existed there, such regret, that she had to look away. She walked into the kitchen and saw their daughters seated at the kitchen table—their cheeks still circled with red from the cold. They wore matching chocolate mustaches from the hot chocolate Mabel had made. Mabel herself was standing in front of the stove, where she always seemed to be these days, as if the kitchen was the only place in the house where she felt comfortable.

  Meanwhile, Vivienne joined in the song, “Mom-my, Dad-dy; Mom-my, Dad-dy,” and the disparate sisters tilted back their dark and fair heads and swooped their spoons through the air, believing everything in their worlds was perfect. And into this fray of love and life and marriage and loss, Chandler and Ruth waltzed. They stood behind their daughters’ chairs, hearts full and torn, as Mabel passed them mugs of hot chocolate, and outside the world flurried with white, and at the edge of this familiar Rockwellian display, a man—who was no longer a bachelor but no longer someone’s husband—sat in a cabin and waited for the next step.

  Sofie whined, “How come you and Daddy can’t sleep beside us like last night?”

  “Because,” Ruth said, “Mommy doesn’t sleep as well on the floor.”

  “Then can I sleep between you?”

  Somehow, Ruth and Chandler had managed to navigate the rest of the day and the parenting duties it entailed—supper, baths, hair and teeth brushing, books, cups of water to quench Sofie’s sudden, all-consuming thirst—without looking or speaking directly to each other, reminiscent of how little they’d looked or spoken before Chandler left.

  But Sofie’s question forced them to look at each other now. Chandler nodded once at Ruth, and her stomach sank, understanding he wanted her to explain their new family dynamics, probably since she was the one who’d initiated the change. They couldn’t keep up the subterfuge of the perfect family forever because the children needed to know the truth. And yet, to inflict pain—for information’s sake alone—was unfathomable.

  So Ruth sat very still, and very straight, on the end of the bed and looked at the brush marks in her daughters’ wet hair; their smooth, high foreheads; Vi’s sparkling, wide eyes in contrast to Sofie’s narrowed ones, which appeared confused and more than a little wary, as if she’d already learned it was better to keep herself from being caught off guard.

  Clearing her throat, Ruth folded her hands in her lap. “Your father and I, we love you very much.” It was clichéd to say such a thing before wrecking your children’s lives, but it seemed important, somehow, to establish this bedrock before tearing down everything around it, so Sofie and Vivienne could know all of this had nothing to do with them.

  But was that the truth?

  Chandler and Ruth’s marriage had begun to implode after they found themselves shifting from newlyweds to parents nearly overnight, as Sofie’s adoption went through faster than even the orphanage director had planned. Therefore, flirtatious quips were replaced with parental batons, and as reality set in, Ruth found the exchange of such batons was neither fair nor graceful. Chandler had signed on the same line as she, and yet she was the one who carried most of the weight. Three years later, when Vivienne was born, this weight increased but the division of responsibility remained the same. So, no, it wasn’t the children’s fault their marriage had imploded, but the implosion itself had everything to do with them.

  Ruth tried again. “Your father and I love you very much, and we love each other too and always will—” Chandler nodded and smiled at the girls, but Ruth could see his expression was as sincere as her words. “But remember when we thought your daddy was . . .” Ruth paused, searching for a euphemism. “No longer alive?” Sofie nodded but Vi looked as carefree as always, as if that period had already been lost in the mercifully morphing maze of her toddler consciousness. “Since I thought your daddy wasn’t coming back, Elam and I fell in love.” Ruth wiped her hands on her jeans. “We got married. And now we’re going to live here, with him.”

  Sofie looked between her mother and her father, and Ruth watched the moment her words registered. It was as if Sofie’s mind decided to take a break until everything made more sense. This was a self-defense mechanism, a way to retreat when life became too harsh. Ruth didn’t want her daughter to go to that place, to revert to the dull-eyed, taciturn girl she’d become after Chandler’s pseudo-death. Ruth reached out toward Sofie to draw her back, but Sofie scrambled away from her mother. Her mouth became a large, dark slice as she screamed. Plugging her ears, Vivienne tried to get away from her older sister but remained on the bed.

  “Baby, baby,” Chandler crooned to Sofie. “It’s okay.”

  Leaning forward, he wrapped his arms around his older daughter and rocked her against his chest. Sofie held tight to him and watched Ruth, and she could see the accusation in her dark gaze. Ruth didn’t blame her. If she looked at it through her daughter’s young eyes, she would also blame herself. It was difficult, if not impossible, to try to understand what had happened between her and Elam, so how could she possibly explain it in six-year-old terms?

  Vivienne tentatively unplugged her fingers from her ears and looked at Sofie. Vi smiled, but Sofie’s face remained a caricature of nothingness; an eerie reverberation from the reactive attachment disorder Ruth and Chandler had battled since her adoption.

  “My da-da,” Sofie sai
d in a baby voice, and she buried her head in Chandler’s chest.

  Chandler rested his head on Sofie’s and looked at Ruth. Unlike his daughter, there was no accusation in his gaze, and yet Ruth felt it from all sides: she was choosing a relationship with a man she’d only known for the past six months over the resurrection of her family, marriage, and home. What kind of woman—and mother—was she? But she knew: she was the kind of woman who’d found life in not only being spoken to and looked at, but also in being listened to and studied like her words held meaning, like the shape of her face was the last map of the world.

  Sofie cried herself to sleep. She had cried herself to sleep before but never for the reason she cried herself to sleep tonight. Throughout it all, Ruth and Chandler remained next to her bed, trying to soothe the pain they’d dealt. Now, the parents of the two little souls tucked under quilts upstairs sat on the couch. The fire had burned down to nothing but dull orange ash. The household was quiet. The darkness wrapped around them, and yet the facade of intimacy it created only exacerbated that they had no intimacy left.

  After a while, Chandler said, “That was hard, wasn’t it?”

  The mere mention of what had taken place caused tears to rise in Ruth’s throat. When she knew her voice wouldn’t break, Ruth said, “I didn’t plan on any of this when I married you.”

  Chandler sighed. Leaning forward on the couch, he rested his head in his hands. “Of course not,” he said. “Can you imagine if we could have seen what our married life would look like before we said, ‘I do’? All the heartache? Neither of us would have gone through with it.” He turned toward her on the couch, and Ruth watched their shadows merge on the wall. But he did not touch her, and she was grateful. “We had a lot of joy, too, though. Didn’t we?”