How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  Ruth wanted to weep. She remembered their first dance as husband and wife, signing Sofie’s adoption papers, Chandler kissing her forehead—with tears in his eyes—after she gave birth to Vi. She had never had time to mourn her marriage to Chandler because she was too busy mourning his death. And now, she found herself grieving him while he was sitting beside her. How is it possible, she thought, to feel such distance from someone whose child you have borne? Whose body has lain beside yours in the bed? And despite everything, a large, consuming part of her still loved this man. Even Ruth’s body responded to his nearness. She wanted to move closer, to lean on him, to draw comfort from him after such a taxing night. But this wasn’t possible. It hadn’t been possible for years.

  “Chandler?” she whispered. “What happened to us?”

  Her husband, and the father of her children, lifted his head and looked at her, having heard the sorrow in her voice, and the grief, as if she were not speaking to him so much as his ghost. “There was this one night, when I was in Afghanistan,” he said, “and I was sitting in that apartment complex I told you about. It’d been bombed to the point you couldn’t tell how many rooms there were, or how many people had lived there. But the kitchen was pretty much intact. A pot of rice was on the stove and a houseplant was above the fridge. I sat there and could see smudges on the chair legs from all the hands that had touched them, and I placed my hands on those fingerprints and closed my eyes, imagining the children who’d sat there, and their parents, and all the different times they must’ve sat around that table—not comprehending that one of those times would be their last—and I began to cry. I missed you and the girls so badly, it felt like a weight on my chest.”

  Chandler reached out and took her hand, and she allowed him to hold it, because he was the first person who’d made her a wife and a mother, and for everything she’d lost, she remained both of those things. “I think—” He paused. “I think I sat at our kitchen table every day and never took time to understand that one day my girls would be grown and everything would change. I felt like time would go on forever; that life would go on the same as it always had, but that wasn’t the case. I didn’t know that wasn’t the case until it became too late, and I lost you all.”

  “You haven’t lost them,” Ruth said, squeezing his fingers.

  He looked over; she could feel his breath on her skin. “No,” he said. “But I’ve lost you.”

  CHAPTER 17

  RUTH, AGAIN, COULDN’T SLEEP. Part of the problem was that she didn’t know where to sleep. She didn’t feel comfortable going into Elam’s empty bedroom with Chandler asleep on the couch, and Ruth didn’t want to risk disturbing Sofie by moving Vivienne back into her crib.

  So Ruth crept upstairs and knocked on her mother-in-law’s door. Even as she did, she felt nervous to be vulnerable with Mabel like she had before Chandler returned. But then the door opened, and Mabel was standing there, holding an oil lamp that illuminated her tired face.

  Ruth, suddenly overwhelmed with affection, reached across the doorway and rested her hand against the side of the older woman’s cheek. “I love your laugh lines,” she said.

  Mabel reached up to place a hand over Ruth’s. “They were carved by tears, too.”

  Ruth didn’t ask to come in, and Mabel didn’t invite her. She merely pulled the door open, and her daughter-in-law crossed the threshold into the room. A black wrought-iron bed frame contrasted with the white walls. A crocheted doily scalloped the edge of an end table centered between the bed and the small window. On top, a dried bouquet, left over from summer, sprouted from a blue Ball jar. Looking, once more, at her mother-in-law’s things, Ruth saw she had brought as little to Wisconsin as Ruth herself had.

  Ruth said, “We told the girls tonight.”

  “About you and Elam?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “You mean, you and Chandler aren’t going to try to reconcile?”

  “How can we? There’s nothing of us left.”

  “There’s plenty left. You have a covenant before God, and you have the girls.”

  “Chandler broke that covenant when he went to Afghanistan.”

  Mabel stared at Ruth. “That’s not how a covenant works.”

  Ruth’s heart beat in her hands. “But I made that same covenant with Elam. If the two of us were just entering a relationship, then, yes, I would understand setting it aside to focus on rebuilding our family, but Elam deserves as much consideration as Chandler does.”

  Mabel looked at her until Ruth blinked and looked away. “You really believe that?”

  Ruth didn’t reply, and she knew a reply wasn’t expected, for the intensity of such a question had to be rhetorical in nature.

  Mabel’s stern expression didn’t change as she abruptly turned and walked toward the bed. Ruth noted the rumpled hook rug beside it and the worn Bible open on the quilt and knew Mabel had been up here, in the darkness of her small room, praying for their family. This testament of familial and divine love should have touched Ruth. But she felt manipulated, as if it were staged. Was Mabel using God to get Ruth to do what she wanted?

  Old bedsprings creaked as Mabel took one side of the bed. She patted the spot beside her. Ruth stared at that spot and then stared at Mabel’s hand. Ringless, slightly swollen at the knuckles, and embroidered with veins, that hand revealed Mabel’s life history better than the rest of her did. Mabel would lose just as much as her granddaughters if Ruth chose a life with Elam and forsook the one she and Chandler had made. Ruth flexed her own fingers, twirling Elam’s Claddagh, and walked toward the bed. Part of the reason Ruth shied from such an invitation was because she had never received one. Not one like this, from a woman who could’ve been her mother. Ruth’s own mother had never made such a simple invitation throughout Ruth’s childhood and teenage years, when the invitation was needed most.

  Mabel set the oil lamp on the table as Ruth sat down. She turned toward her daughter-in-law. “Every covenant relationship,” she said, “has moments when it would be easier to throw in the towel than persevere. The hardest time for us as a couple was when Chandler was a baby and Chandler Senior was in medical school. We had no money, not even for groceries, so we had to live off whatever I’d picked from the garden or canned. I was home with Chandler Junior all day, and because I’d grown up so Plain, I’d never learned to drive. I was isolated during one of the worst winters in Pennsylvania history. So whenever my husband came home, I wanted to talk and reconnect, and he just wanted to eat and go to bed. We lived like this for over a year, and I will tell you that, by the end of it, I had no idea who I was, or what I was doing, married to a man I knew I loved but didn’t like very much.”

  Ruth murmured, “How did you find each other again?”

  Mabel smiled sadly. “It was simple but hard,” she said. “I forced myself to forgive him; then I mentally drew a circle around myself and focused on fixing the person inside it. And each day, instead of counting the ways Chandler was failing me, I started praying for him. I started praying for him more than I ever prayed for anyone in my life. More than I even prayed for our son. I put him at the forefront of my prayer life, and it changed everything.” Mabel paused. “I don’t think anything changed with him, really, but God changed my heart. I started seeing my covenant relationship with my husband as an earthly picture of God’s covenant relationship with me. His love wasn’t fickle. He didn’t only love me when I gave my all to him. He loved me in my brokenness. In my selfishness. If I was going to love my husband like Christ loved me, that meant I had to love him without reservation. Even when he did not deserve it. Understanding this was such a gift. I went from begrudging my husband his freedom, to come and go as he pleased while I stayed home to care for our child, to being grateful he was working so hard to provide for us and wanting to bless him for it.”

  “So it all came down to your perspective.”

  Mabel nodded. “It did. I focused on God’s love for me, and this awareness caused my heart to expand and my t
ongue to lose its edge. I became a kinder, gentler person who put my spouse’s needs before my own. Chandler Senior didn’t know what had happened to me, because I didn’t tell him, but he could see the difference in each area of our lives. We went from being partners to being friends again, and by becoming friends again, we became lovers.” Mabel laughed, and then grew serious. “I know this has to be the hardest season you and Chandler have walked through, but I also know there are two little girls, sleeping one wall away, who are worth fighting for, even if you think your marriage to Chandler isn’t.”

  Ruth looked down, the sacrifice that was being asked of her burning like acid inside her chest. “I’m sorry we’re putting you through this, Mom.”

  It was the first time Ruth had called Mabel “Mom,” and each woman understood this moniker was a penance and a gift. Mabel blinked to clear tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry too,” she said. “But I doubt you would’ve pursued a relationship with Elam if I hadn’t pushed you.”

  Ruth reached across the quilt and took Mabel’s hand. “You made a suggestion,” she said. “That was all. I am the one who made the choice to enter into a relationship with him.” She paused, recalling sleeping with Elam in front of the cottage fire and the indescribable sense of peace she felt, as tangible as his arms. “It wasn’t all for nothing,” Ruth continued. “I have to believe that, or else I don’t know how I could go on.”

  Mabel asked, “Do you want to sleep here tonight, Ruth?”

  Ruth murmured, “That’s actually why I came up.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve given you more than what you asked.”

  “No, please. Don’t apologize. You’ve given me what I didn’t know I needed.”

  Mabel blew out the lamp. The two women crawled beneath the quilts. The older woman believed she was at the beginning of the end of her life; the younger woman believed she was at the end of the beginning of hers. But both believed falsely. They were each at the cusp of a new life, a new beginning, and though it didn’t resemble what they’d had, or even wanted, it would be what each of them needed—a fulfillment of a promise; a future and a hope. But they couldn’t foresee, and so it was a long time before either woman slept.

  The sun hadn’t risen when Ruth awoke, but she knew as soon as she opened her eyes that God’s answer was the same. Mabel snored softly beside her, the steady rhythm threatening to put Ruth back to sleep. But she had to get up now if she was going to talk to Chandler undisturbed. She tiptoed downstairs in the same clothing she’d worn to bed. She crossed the living room and knelt before the couch much like she’d knelt before Mabel’s window last night, looking out at the moonlit farm and silently asking God for another, less painful way. But there wasn’t one. Now, Chandler was still sleeping. Chandler’s longer hair, tumbled over his brow, made him look younger than he was. Ruth allowed herself to look at him, not as she’d looked at him before—as her husband or the father of her children—but as a man whose journey had briefly paralleled hers. With this perspective, the part of her heart that had died toward this lovely, imperfect man beat, for a moment, with perfect, unconditional love.

  Ruth whispered his name. Again she said it, as loudly as she dared. This time, Chandler stirred. The quilt covering him dropped to the floor. He turned on his side, exhaled, and opened his heavy eyes. They widened when he saw her there.

  Ruth’s courage faltered. She considered making up some excuse for why she was there. But then she recalled her conversation with Mabel and knew part of the reason her marriage to Chandler had failed was because neither of them had understood skirting the truth was the same as dishonesty. “Chandler,” she whispered, “can I talk to you a minute?”

  He nodded and sat up. His appearance made it seem he wasn’t fully awake, but just his body responding from muscle memory, which recalled all the times Ruth had woken him with a similar question before launching into a diatribe. But that similarity was where the cycle of their past stopped. Swallowing, Ruth said, “I never told you I’m sorry. I never saw I even had anything to be sorry for. I was so focused on everything you were doing wrong, I didn’t see I was equally to blame. I’m sorry for that, Chandler. I’m really sorry.”

  Ruth’s tears fell as her words fell: fast, hot, and undeterred.

  Chandler leaned forward on the couch and took her hands. “Ruth,” he said. He stopped there, at her name, until she looked up at him. “Please don’t say you’re sorry when I’ve made so many mistakes. That makes me feel worse.”

  “We both made mistakes,” she insisted. “And often, our mistakes fed off each other: you neglected me, and I became bitter because of that neglect. But I had a choice, even then. I didn’t make the right one, Chandler. I blamed you for not being enough for me, for not being there for me, but you’re just a man, not God. You were never meant to fill up my broken places. You were never meant to fill up my cracks.”

  Chandler relented. He leaned back on the couch and sighed. “How different our marriage would have been if we’d known at the beginning what we know now.”

  She let go of his hand as she stood. “I guess that’s why some people stick it out. They grow up together instead of growing apart.” She paused. “I’ll be back soon. I have to go see Elam.”

  Light vanished from Chandler’s eyes. “Take your time,” he said. “I’ll stay with the kids.”

  Even in that simple sentence, Ruth could hear what he did not say: This is our life now: taking turns and exchanging custody of our children. This is the norm. Or will become it.

  But he did not know their lives were about to change again.

  Ruth sensed the temperature change as she stepped outside. Water dripped from the icicles barnacled to the roofline, and for one of the first times since she came to Wisconsin, her breath didn’t rise in a cloud. She closed the door behind her, heard the definite little click. She glanced through the tempered window glass, watching as Chandler’s silhouette disappeared around the corner as he, presumably, lay back down on the couch. She walked in the dark toward the cabin. Layers of frost were thawing, forcing Ruth to slough through the mud filling the lane’s potholes that had been patched with ice or snow for months.

  The lamp was already lit in Elam’s cabin, and Ruth could hear deep, mournful music notes riding the morning air like a soundtrack to grief. He felt the same as she.

  Elam stopped playing when she entered but did not rise from the bench.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  He asked, “Do you want to sit down?”

  “That would be wonderful, thank you.”

  Ruth feared Elam would walk over and pull out her chair, take her jacket . . . touch her in some way. But he didn’t. She sat at the kitchen table and didn’t know what she would do if she suddenly found herself too close to him. For as much as Chandler drew her to him because of their life history, Elam drew her to him because of the life they had yet to share.

  Elam turned on the piano bench, his arms folded, knees pointed toward the wall. Ruth looked away and swallowed.

  Ruth loved each man, albeit in different ways, so where did that leave her? It left her doing whatever she possibly could to keep her girls’ lives as normal as possible, when they’d experienced so little normalcy in the past five years. It was for them she was willing to risk everything; it was for them she was willing to give everything up. “I came here,” Ruth said and stopped, because—the same as when she’d told the children—she couldn’t begin such a conversation without telling Elam how much he meant to her. But when she glanced up, she could see by the way he was looking at her, he knew what she had come here to say.

  “I came here to let you know I’m going to try to reconcile my marriage to Chandler.”

  Elam hung his head. “So this means,” he said, “you’re going to annul ours.”

  Ruth straightened, and her spine grated against the back of the chair. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t have any other choice.”

  Elam nodded but didn’t look up. She watched morning light sn
eak its way through the crevices of the cabin. “I’m sorry,” she added. “That it’s come to this.”

  “It never should have,” he said.

  Ruth’s throat sealed over her effort not to protest, not to declare that, yes, it should have happened. To deny the rightness of them was to deny their love. But was this truly love? Yes, Elam adored Ruth in a way she’d never been adored before, but over time would that have changed? As they lived day in and day out beside each other, witnessing each other’s flaws and bitterest heartaches, would he eventually take her for granted, the same as his cousin had done? The same as Ruth had done? She didn’t know, but she suspected as much.

  Life’s beauty could only be seen once the dross of the everyday had been removed; for Chandler, being separated from his family had removed the dross; for Ruth, his death had removed the dross, but the results had manifested themselves in wholly incompatible ways.

  “I am not sorry it happened,” she said. “I’m just sorry it has to end.”

  Elam looked up. Tears shone on his weathered face, his soft heart also incompatible with such a hard-looking man. “That’s where we’re different,” he said. “I’m sorry for both.”

  Ruth could no longer hold back her sobbing by the time she passed the channel. She wrapped her arms around herself while the audible force of the pain ravaged her body, but she continued walking as if an inner compass directed her toward the farmhouse—which dually represented her life with Elam and the life that now existed inside it, with Chandler and their girls. Even as she succumbed to her grief, Ruth knew she had to stop. She didn’t want to scare the children, who hadn’t seen her cry like this even after receiving news of their father’s death.

  Ruth finished walking up the lane and sat on the porch steps. She stared at the acreage, the mud-brown fields interrupted by the cranberry-red barn. Despite being caught in the purgatory between seasons, the land was beautiful still. She wondered if she could stay here while trying to reconcile her marriage, at the expense of the marriage she wanted. Elam had told her she could; that he would leave, since he would always associate Driftless Valley Farm with their star-crossed union. But this same reason was why she didn’t want to remain.