How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  Aria Neufeld was not different. She belonged. Perhaps now, after all this time, Ruth understood Elam had made the right choice by staying out of their lives, and that was why she’d sent him a handwritten note along with the wedding invitation: Come. I want you there.

  The wedding reception was held in a hotel ballroom in La Crosse. Elam ate the catered food, drank a flute of sparkling cranberry juice, and tried not to track his daughter as she moved around the room in her wedding dress, as if he might never see her again. He’d taken such little part in Aria’s life, he didn’t feel he had the right to encroach by talking to her. Besides, Ruth was also there, in her beaded gold dress, looking as lovely as her daughter as she thanked the guests for coming. He didn’t allow himself to watch her either. He was so focused on not watching either of them, he nearly spilled the flute when he glanced up and saw Aria standing by his chair.

  “Cousin Elam,” Aria said, and leaned down to kiss his cheek. “So glad you could come.”

  It cut and healed him—the innocence of such words.

  Elam gave Aria an awkward side hug and shook hands with Aria’s husband, Matthew, whom he’d only seen in the small photo accompanying the invitation. And if Elam’s handshake was a little firmer than it needed to be—well, that was the one right Elam felt he could take.

  But then it was time for the first dance, and Matthew led Aria onto the small wooden dance floor: her train tacked in the back, and her veil removed, so Elam could see her hair was the same shade as her mother’s. This was followed by the father/daughter dance. Elam continued sitting at his table near the dividing panels, which partially hid him from view.

  But Ruth still saw him. She came over and leaned down toward his ear. “Can you play for them?” She gestured loosely, and her wedding ring glinted. “There’s a piano in the corner.”

  Elam made a show of looking, but he had noticed it before.

  “Please, Elam,” she said and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Do it for me.”

  Elam sat there a moment: Ruth’s hand still on his shoulder, his heart pounding in his ears. Elam couldn’t look at her. He just nodded and rose from his seat. Buttoning his suit jacket, he crossed the ballroom floor over to the piano. He sat on the bench, lifted the lid, and tested the baby grand’s keys. It was in tune. Chandler led Aria—his daughter, Elam’s daughter—onto the dance floor, and Elam struck the minor chord of the haunting melody he had composed after Aria’s birth, “Letting Go Is Not Good-bye.” During the refrain, Elam allowed himself to look at Ruth. She was watching him, her eyes gemstone-green with unshed tears.

  “Thank you,” she mouthed, and he nodded.

  He would do anything for her, and so it would always remain.

  CHAPTER 21

  MARCH 19, 2019

  Dear Chandler,

  I don’t know why I keep writing you letters I know you are never going to read. Perhaps I need to write them just like I needed to write this book: to understand the past six years and see that, if I could go back, the only thing I would change is that I would have loved you better.

  The truth is, knowing what I know now, going through what I have, I would have still married you. For six years, you and I were two souls joined on an ever-changing journey. It was a journey that required us to give our best selves—in the valleys and on the mountaintops—and sometimes we did this without expecting to get the best in return; sometimes we did not give our best, but for the most part, we loved each other anyway.

  I write this because it’s a reminder. A reminder that, even though you’re gone, I don’t have to end here.

  Be well, my love. Be at peace. I promise I’ll keep your memory alive in our daughters’ hearts, but it’s time I reclaimed the pieces of mine.

  Ruth

  Ruth folded the letter to Chandler and set it on top of her manuscript. She tied a piece of twine around it all and held the bundle against her chest. The Book of Ruth—conceived from grief, labored with love, born for closure—was as precious to her as a child, as precious to her as Aria would have been, if she had actually existed. Ruth looked around the one-room cabin, at the table and chair where she had written her first novel over the past six months.

  Six months. How had time passed so quickly? After Elam offered his cabin to Ruth as her art studio, she knew she could not leave. But Elam, wanting to protect Ruth’s reputation, also could not stay. He returned to the cabin each night to sleep but never entered it during daytime hours, allowing Ruth to use it just like he had promised.

  In the meantime, they had cautiously waded in the shallows of their relationship while hopeful of the depths waiting to be explored. They had taken walks after the girls were in bed. They had stayed up late, talking and cuddling in front of the fire, so Elam had had to awaken Ruth and tell her she should head upstairs to bed. They had introduced the girls to snow, to Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy, and Elam was so comfortable with them now, he never stuttered as he read. Ruth now did the marketing for Driftless Valley Farm and had enrolled Sofie at the community school, where Amy Brunk, Elam’s longtime admirer, treated the little girl with such kindness, Ruth nearly felt guilty she had been the one to claim Elam’s heart. But not even guilt could diminish what had been restored.

  Sofie and Vi were blooming. They had never lived in a community like this, where their grandma and cousins were within walking distance of their house. They had never lived in a house where their grandma let them brush her hair fifty times each or help her make cookies, which they could sample if it wouldn’t spoil their supper. The girls were so daily inundated with familial love, the culmination nearly eliminated the pain from the paternal love they’d lost. Whenever Sofie’s pain did awaken—often at night, when her subconscious dictated her dreams—Ruth would get up and hold her, rocking her on the bed and singing “Edelweiss” until Sofie’s body had relaxed and the tears on Ruth’s face had dried.

  But mostly, in the past six months, there had been healing. Ruth’s shattered soul was piecing itself back together, one day at a time, and with each piece, she could see how God’s hand had never left her, even in her broken state. If she had known then what she knew now, her marriage to Chandler would have been different. If she had known he was not responsible for her wholeness, because he was broken as well, she wouldn’t have placed expectations on him that he could never meet. God was the only one who could provide such wholeness, the only one who could piece together the broken shards of her heart. Never again would Ruth rely on a man, a husband, to provide her sense of identity and worth. If she ever married again, she would not place such unrealistic expectations upon her husband, and he must not place such expectations upon her. With this perspective, Ruth prayed marriage would look different.

  Standing, she carried her book over to the fire. She knelt and stared at the flames. If only the story had been true. If only Chandler’s father had urged him to go down to the hospital’s safe room to sleep that night. If only he had been there, instead of dying after the first bomb fell. If only he had come back to her and the girls, giving Ruth and Chandler a second chance to understand each other’s perspectives and love each other well. But if only hadn’t happened.

  Instead, Chandler had died and Ruth had obsessed over details that couldn’t be changed until she realized the only way she could change them—the only way she could find closure—was by giving them a different ending. And if her novel had allowed her mind to drift to a union with Elam Albrecht, to envision how he would fight for them if faced with losing her—well, perhaps that hope was healing in itself.

  Now that the story was birthed, Ruth found the hardest thing was she’d thought she could claim it, but the creation of the story itself was what belonged to her: all those hours she’d wept, written, painted, and sketched her broken heart whole. Now that her story was born, now that it was cradled in her loving hands, she stared at it in wonder while aware this was like the song Elam had never written for a daughter they’d never had: “Letting Go Is Not Good-b
ye.” Letting go of the past didn’t mean Ruth would forget what she and Chandler had shared. The final, rewritten chapters of their love story were the most important parts—not the keeping of the book Ruth had created. So she set the tearstained manuscript onto the logs and watched the fire’s heat riffle through the pages—turning them as if looking at the letters and sketches interspersed throughout—before, in a burst of light, devouring the tome.

  Six months of work gone in seconds. Six years of marriage gone just as fast.

  All of creation stood witness to the facts of birth, death, and resurrection. One day, she would see Chandler again; one day, Sofie would no longer cry out in her sleep for a dad who could never come soothe her; one day, Ruth would no longer see herself solely as a widow, and perhaps—if her novel proved prophetic—she would again be someone’s bride.

  Ruth waited until the fire had dwindled to ash and then left the cabin and walked out by the lake. A blue heron lifted its wings, splintering the moon floating in the water, and took to the air. The farmhouse stood on the knoll, aglow with light. Ruth heard the screen door slap. Zeus came gamboling down the steps, panting toward her, his large white body standing out in the dark. He ran and pressed his wet nose against her legs, grateful for her return. And as she rubbed the dog’s ears, she could see him on the porch, Elam, waiting for her return in more ways than one. Silent and steady, Elam stood at the door, his broad shoulders appearing to support the frame.

  Ruth walked toward the house, toward him, thinking, My story is just beginning.

  A Note from the Author

  FIVE YEARS AGO, I took a walk in Wisconsin with my one-year-old daughter. It was below freezing, and the wind chill made it feel colder. I remember bundling her into the stroller so snugly she could barely move. Her brown eyes blinked at me between the pink hat and the fleece blanket I’d pulled up to her chin. The yard of my husband’s uncle and aunt’s white farmhouse, where we were staying, was studded with giant hardwood trees. The lavender sky was a backsplash for red dairy barns, and the gravel road beneath the stroller’s wheels was an icy white sheet.

  Once we returned to the farmhouse, I put my daughter down for a nap and thought about a woman coming to Wisconsin after losing almost everything. That’s when I knew I would write a modern retelling of Ruth set in a Mennonite community. What I did not know was that two years later, my husband and I would sell our home in Tennessee and move, with two little girls by then, to a home with grid-tie solar power seven miles from that Wisconsin farm where I had the idea for How the Light Gets In.

  A few months after we moved, my husband’s uncle shared a newspaper clipping with me regarding a local cranberry farmer who only used old-fashioned equipment. Turns out, Wisconsin is the nation’s leading producer of cranberries. I could picture my modern Ruth in a flooded bog, gleaning berries, just like the biblical Ruth gleaning barley in the fields.

  I will forever cherish the season we spent in Wisconsin. Sometimes I can still hear the off-kilter squeak of the windmill that stood in our front yard or the sound of windows cranking open on the first warm day of spring. But by the end of our second winter, I asked my husband if we could move home to Tennessee. We had moved to Wisconsin on a two-year “try it out” plan, and I was asking to leave even before the two years were up.

  My husband had poured himself into our little homestead: remodeling the 1920s farmhouse, raising and butchering chickens, putting new boards on the old dairy barn, planting three hundred pine trees and long rows of raspberries and blueberries, sowing wildflowers, and building raised garden beds. He was living his dream in Wisconsin—the place he’d started visiting when he was a teenager and would go hunting for weeks at a time—and now I was asking him to give it up. Knowing how lonely I was for our families in Tennessee, my husband put our farm on the market, and to our great surprise, it sold two weeks later.

  We moved back to Tennessee and entered the hardest season of our marriage. My husband had dreamed of homesteading in Wisconsin, and now he had sacrificed that dream to bring me home. He never verbally expressed resentment, but the tension between us was palpable. Around Christmastime, I spoke with an older woman friend about our situation. Her advice was simple, and yet it changed everything: she told me I needed to put my husband at the forefront of my prayer life. Up until that point, frustration had prevented me from really praying for him, but now I began in earnest. Early in the morning, before the girls awoke, I would walk around our land and pray for our marriage. I prayed for the ability to understand the loss of my husband’s dreams. And you know what? I began to understand his perspective. I began to appreciate what he had sacrificed to bring me home.

  Over a year has passed since that difficult season, and I have never loved and respected my husband more. There’s something about walking through hardship together that brings those rote marriage vows to life. Furthermore, I now know my husband can never be responsible for my happiness, for my wholeness; neither can I be responsible for his. We each have to pursue an intimate relationship with Jesus to experience true, lasting intimacy with each other, and this independent pursuit has drawn us more closely together than anything. My husband and I talked about this experience today when we were in our minivan, our now three little girls all piled in the back. He said, “When I gave my dreams and the desires of my heart to Jesus, I found that he became the dream and the desire of my heart.”

  Friends, my dream and the desire of my heart for this novel is to offer hope to marriages, especially those enduring challenging times due to the stresses of life—children, jobs, health, ministry obligations, you name it. Many of the emotions Ruth deals with in this story were in some part drawn from my actual experiences. Please know that I did not write those scenes from a place of judgment, but from a place of empathy. I want you to know that there’s a community out there, wanting to press your hand and murmur, “I’ve been there too.” So, please, don’t give up hope. Your love story is not over. It is just beginning.

  About the Author

  JOLINA PETERSHEIM is the critically acclaimed author of The Alliance, The Divide, The Midwife, and The Outcast, which Library Journal called “outstanding . . . fresh and inspirational” in a starred review and named one of the best books of 2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was featured in Huffington Post’s Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife, “an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down,” and Booklist selected The Alliance as one of their Top 10 Inspirational Fiction Titles for 2016. Jolina’s nonfiction writing has been featured in Reader’s Digest, Writer’s Digest, and Today’s Christian Woman.

  She and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but they now live in the mountains of Tennessee with their three young daughters. Jolina blogs regularly at www.jolinapetersheim.com.

  Discussion Questions

  This novel asks significant questions about marriage and commitment. How do you feel about the answers Ruth comes up with? How might your choices have differed from hers?

  Ruth and Chandler are probably a typical couple whose jobs and children cause them to move apart emotionally, even before they are physically separated. Have you experienced a similar challenge in your marriage, or have you seen this happen to people you know? What could they have done differently to prevent this estrangement?

  Elam set aside his dreams of marriage and family because the circumstances were never right for it. Do you have dreams that have yet to be fulfilled or that you’ve had to set aside for a season? How did Elam keep from growing bitter at having his dream deferred? What can we learn from his example?

  Chandler is doing good, important work in the world, and yet his family suffers for it. Have you ever been in this situation? What are some ways we can discern the right priorities for our various commitments and obligations?

  Did you enjoy learning a little about
cranberry harvesting? What was particularly interesting or surprising about it?

  Did you enjoy reading Ruth and Chandler’s letters to each other in the years before this story takes place? Did they enhance the story for you, or did you find them distracting?

  How did you react when Ruth chose between Chandler and Elam? Was it the choice you wanted her to make? Why or why not?

  What was your reaction to the conclusion of the story? Did you find it satisfying or frustrating? Why do you think the author chose to tell the story this way?

  Why do you think Ruth chooses this strategy to work out her loss? What does she gain by it? Does it seem like a realistic way to process grief?

  Good novels often present what feel like “no-win” moral dilemmas. Can you pose another way that Ruth’s novel might have played out? Another way you would have preferred? Why?

  Which characters in the book have a “happy ending”? Is that good enough for you, or do you wish the author had resolved things differently? How do you see things unfolding for the characters in the months and years ahead?

  The author used the biblical book of Ruth as a stepping-off point for this fictional story. What similarities did you see? What are some of the differences? How do you feel about using Bible events as the basis for fiction?

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