Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Eileen, being the first born, had been more of a rebel than Philly: dying her hair purple, getting her nose pierced and such. She yelled at her parents far more than Philly ever did and, in doing so, made life a little easier for Philly, having blasted away some of their parents’ rough edges. As that pioneering sibling, Eileen held a sort of gatekeeper role for Philly; her acknowledgment of the legitimacy of his experience with Jesus would enlarge the impact of that experience, he believed.

  After nine in the evening, the traffic to O’Hare amounted to a few weary souls returning late from work and a handful of drinkers who had quit before they lost the ability to find their cars. Philly drove conservatively, as an occasional driver and not a hardcore commuter. On top of that, his mind still played with the pieces of his relationship with Eileen, trying to arrange them so that the outcome of his time with her would smell like victory and not reek of shame.

  The highway lights created a corridor through the deepening night, a path that Philly’s car seemed to follow on its own, the wide overpasses at the airport looming above him like the wings of a mother bird, pulling him into safety. With little effort, he found the lane for meeting arrivals and located the sign for the airline on which Eileen had flown. It was 9:40. He had not taken time to check her flight, but knew of no bad weather between Chicago and New York, so he hoped for the best. Eileen would only have carry-on luggage, so she should be waiting behind the yellow curb, under the artificially white lights illuminating the island on which arriving passengers stood, each one looking hopefully for a car and a face they recognized.

  Philly spotted Eileen before she saw him. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest, her weight on her right foot and her left foot propped up on her high heel, the sharp toe of her stylish shoe pointing toward the sky. Then she saw him, as he slowed to allow a cab to withdraw from the curb. He waited for a minivan to coast slowly ahead of him, the driver apparently looking for someone he knew and wanted to take home with him. Eileen grinned reservedly and reached down for the extended handle of the small, carry-on case which stood next to her. Philly parked and swung his door open carefully, hoisting himself out of the low driver’s seat and feeling the urgent wind buffet his face and tousle his hair. He still needed a haircut. Eileen noticed this, but said nothing, learning in her maturity to not say everything she observed, though the lesson was most difficult to remember when it came to her little brother.

  “Hey, how are you?” Philly said, grabbing a full frontal hug and smiling gregariously at his sole sibling.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m actually doing pretty good,” Philly said, a hint of discovery in his voice as the answer occurred to him. He took her case from her and scooted back around to the driver’s side, having forgotten to pop open the trunk. As he made the circuit, he noticed that Jesus had gotten into the back seat, solving a problem about which Philly had not yet begun to worry.

  Eileen watched Philly, moving around the car, studying him as if to discover what about his manner seemed different. She couldn’t pinpoint it.

  “What’s up with you?” She couldn’t resist.

  Philly slid into the driver’s seat and Eileen mirrored his entrance on the other side of the car. Starting the car, Philly check the rearview mirror and seized an opening.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Eileen shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s just something different about you. Are you in love or something?”

  Philly laughed uncomfortably. Love is a subject he would have addressed with Eileen and he did think of Brenda immediately when she asked, but he knew that his sister’s guess had missed the mark.

  “Mmm, I don’t think that’s it,” he said.

  “Is this the same car you had when I was here last?” Eileen said, trying a different tack.

  “Yep. It was brand new when you were here, remember?” Philly said, hitting the gas to accelerate past slower traffic on the highway leading into the city.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eileen said. “It’s nicer than I remembered.”

  Philly glanced over his shoulder at Jesus sitting behind Eileen. He was smiling broadly. This confirmed what Philly had begun to surmise. Eileen was detecting the presence of Jesus or, perhaps, the effect of his presence on her brother.

  “How’s Brenda, these days?” Eileen said, persisting in her quest to scratch an elusive itch.

  “She’s fine. I’ve talked to her a bit this week. But I don’t think we’ll be going out for a while.”

  “So, you are seeing her again?”

  “I’d like to, but she’s not so sure just now,” Philly said, explaining without actually explaining everything. “We haven’t gone out since we broke up two years ago.”

  That concrete bit of information covered the obfuscation that preceded it. For Philly, this was not calculated, but instinctual, a defensive move to protect a vulnerable spot. He had always allowed Eileen into his relationships, but always on his terms and in his time. He was not ready to talk about Brenda yet. First things first.

  Eileen nodded and seemed to relax for a moment, not a common state for her, in Philly’s experience.

  “You seem relaxed,” he said.

  Eileen lifted her head off the headrest and looked at Philly, “Yeah, I guess it’s good to be home. Believe it or not, New York is way more tense and fast-paced than Chicago.”

  “I believe it,” Philly said.

  As if reminded by her own comment, Eileen rubbed her neck. “Got one of those cricks in my neck,” she said.

  Jesus leaned forward, his face next to Eileen’s head rest, and he said to Philly, “I could heal that, you know.”

  Philly glanced at Jesus, whose proximity to Eileen bothered him.

  Then Jesus said it again, “I can heal her neck pain.”

  Philly forced himself to respond mentally. “Why are you saying that?”

  “Because it’s true and because I’ll need your hand to help.”

  As Philly checked from the corner of his eye, Jesus reached around to Eileen’s left shoulder, but his hand did that disappearing thing. “Now you just put your hand where my hand would be,” he said.

  Philly caught himself drifting toward the next lane of the thruway and corrected a bit too abruptly. Eileen moaned, that maneuver jostling her painful neck.

  “Go ahead,” Jesus said. “I’ll watch that you don’t crash.”

  Philly focused on the road, but glanced at Eileen, asking Jesus, “What do I have to do?”

  “Just put your hand here and say, ‘Jesus heals you.’”

  Philly gripped the steering wheel extra tight and kept his eyes forward, unable to imagine himself doing and saying that. “I can’t,” he said internally.

  Eileen picked up the conversation again, as Philly headed toward his parents’ house. “Did you see Grandma today?”

  Philly shook his head, “No, not today. I know Ma was there for a while tonight. I’ll go see her tomorrow.”

  Eileen nodded, “It’s hard to imagine her in a coma, or even gone for good. I really miss her.”

  “Me too,” Philly said.

  They drove in silence over dark streets with few other cars to slow them, only a few traffic lights flipping from green, to yellow, to red. Clouds dominated the night sky, but the moon shown bright through large tears in the ragged covering.

  “Maybe you can come and get me for lunch tomorrow and we can see Grandma together,” Eileen said. “I want to spend some time there without Ma.”

  Philly nodded, “Sure. That would be good. But you can’t tell Ma until I get there, so she doesn’t have time to tag along.”

  Eileen knew how to maneuver around her mother, but Philly had more recent practice at it, so she didn’t resent the tactical reminder. She did notice how readily Philly planned for those tactics, understanding more about the extent to which her mother persisted in attempting to control Philly, even in his late thirties. Eileen could see how inappropriate that contro
l was, the way one easily perceives how inappropriate is someone else’s choice of clothes designed a for thinner, younger person.

  They turned into the neighborhood, not far from the Tollway, where their parents lived. They both felt the intestinal churn of lurking gremlins from their childhood, as they neared the residence that would reunite the dislocated and entangled family.

  After ten o’clock, they both knew that their father would be in bed and their mother waiting up for them. Philly remembered the promise of chocolate cake and his mouth started to water for that lifelong comfort food, washed down with cold milk, of course.

  Jesus rode along quietly, attentive to his two fellow travelers. He followed them into the house, after Philly parked in the driveway. He didn’t say anything to Philly during the raucous greeting between Ma and Eileen, nor while sitting in the gray and yellow kitchen under a single sixty-watt light bulb, pleasantly following the conversation. And, when Philly excused himself just before eleven o’clock, Jesus rose from his seat and joined Philly in hugging his mother and sister and saying goodbye. Philly didn’t notice the unusual look of longing left on the faces of the two women, as he and Jesus stepped out into the dark.

  Chapter Seven

  Philly had gone to sleep thinking about the young woman on the bus and the look on her face when he delivered Jesus’s message to her. In his sleep, she stayed with him, as he dreamt of being married to her and yet unable to touch her. Frustration mounted as each time he even thought about touching her she disappeared, until he had to accept that, though she was his wife, he wouldn’t be allowed to ever touch her in any way. Of course, Brenda substituted for the unnamed woman on the bus, at times, and other unrecognizable women also stood in for some scenes of the maddening subconscious episode. Though Jesus didn’t appear in those dreams, Philly seemed to be aware of his presence throughout his unrequited journey.

  When he woke in the morning, his first thought formed this way: “I think that was all Jesus’s fault.” Immediately he questioned this conclusion, as more of his mind engaged the waking world, which included Jesus sitting in the chair in the opposite corner of the room, petting Irving.

  The cat seemed able to restrain his Saturday morning angst over the lateness of his meal while in Jesus’s lap, as he had never been able to do for Philly. Motion from the mound of a man in the bed awakened Irving’s hunger, however, and he jumped to the floor and circled the bed to find Philly’s face. The big gray cat stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the mattress next to the man’s rumpled, morning face. Philly opened one eye and then closed it just in time to avoid the cushioned, clawless paw of his apartment mate, which batted his cheek and eye. This method had worked on most weekend mornings in the past and Philly was just glad that Irving didn’t resort to it any earlier than seven o’clock.

  Wrestling his right arm free to fend off his furry assailant, Philly opened both eyes and looked at the digital clock, which read seven fifty-three. “That may be a record for a Saturday,” Philly said aloud, employing his other hand to scratch Irving between, and in front of, his ears. Part of this weekly routine included Irving prolonging his patience on Sundays, often waiting past eight before pouncing on his unconscious provider.

  Philly yawned, stretched and rolled over to see Jesus sitting and smiling, as he expected. “You’re still here,” Philly said, the way one might speak to an old friend who had come to visit. This friend would apparently not leave without saying goodbye. Philly had never had such a reliable companion, except Irving, perhaps.

  After going to the bathroom, and pulling on a pair of sweat pants, Philly carried out his usual Saturday schedule of tasks, with Jesus as a welcomed sidekick. At eight, he turned on the public radio station and listened to the mix of human interest and news broadcasting that filled in behind his ordinary Saturday activities. Philly liked listening to the radio with Jesus even more than he liked listening on his own. The Savior would occasionally offer his own commentary to a news story.

  When the report on a Congressional committee meeting on budget priorities ended, Jesus said of the chairwoman of that committee, “I hope she gets some rest. She’s really feeling the stress of all this, on top of the problems she’s having with her daughter.”

  If Philly had been a serious political wonk, he would have known about the drug-related arrest of the nineteen-year-old daughter, so Jesus was not divulging confidential information, while still making a standard news story into a personal concern. If Philly had been a praying man, he would have taken that nugget of insight as agenda for intercession. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows, impressed that Jesus could see beyond the politics, to the people involved. Philly would pay more attention to the news if he knew this sort of personal information about the movers and shakers.

  Around eleven o’clock, Eileen called to confirm their lunch date. From her hushed tone, Philly could tell that she was concealing her plans from her mother. His big sister had slipped right back into that old slotted track around which she had spun, more than two decades before. In her days as the bad girl of the family, sneaking out on her mother had been a standard move.

  Not long after hanging up with Eileen, Philly led Jesus out to the car, all cleaned up and dressed for the day, except for his neglected whiskers. Grandma wouldn’t notice, he concluded, when he stopped to consider whether to break his usual Saturday moratorium on shaving. Jesus clearly didn’t shave, wearing the standard Jesus beard that any Sunday school kid would expect. If he needed further justification for not shaving, Philly had the ammunition right there next to him, in plain sight.

  Spending Saturday alone rarely interested or satisfied Philly. Going to pick up his sister for lunch was a nice reprieve from lonely weekends. Making the trip with Jesus sitting in his passenger seat levitated his mood even higher. The climax of this levity came when they stopped behind a car at a stop light and read the bumper sticker, “Dog is my copilot.” Both Jesus and Philly laughed to the point of tears at the outrageous irony.

  “You didn’t arrange that, did you?” Philly finally said, after wiping a tear off his cheek and sniffling.

  That started both of them laughing again, though probably for different reasons.

  Eileen stood on the driveway of their parents’ house talking on her cell phone. She waved to Philly, as he pulled up the long, concrete drive. Ending her call, Eileen dropped her phone into her small, gray purse and opened the car door. Jesus vanished from Philly’s view, but then waved in the rear view mirror to show Philly where he had gone.

  “I told Ma I was going outside to make a phone call,” Eileen said. “It was the only way I could get out. She was all over me.”

  “You gonna call her and tell her what you’re doing?” Philly said, with humor in his voice.

  “Yes. What are you laughing at?”

  Philly backed the car down the drive, shaking his head. “It’s just amazing how far we have to go to live adult lives without Ma’s meddling.”

  Eileen shrugged and retrieved her phone, making a call to Ma that required some terse and irascible responses on Eileen’s part. Philly could hear the plaintiff tone of his mother’s voice escaping the tiny speaker on the phone. The call ended with a primal noise reverberating from Eileen’s throat, between the bulging veins on her neck.

  “Looks like a two martini lunch,” Philly said.

  Eileen snorted. “Why are you in such a good mood?”

  Philly just shook his head slightly and grinned. “I was thinking salad for lunch.”

  Eileen looked impressed. “That’s nice of you. I know it’s not your favorite.”

  “Oh, I get a craving now and then,” Philly said. “Probably just before I have a heart attack from not eating healthy enough.”

  “A salad sounds great,” Eileen said.

  Jesus remained attentive, but silent, through the ride to Eileen’s favorite salad spot and through ordering and brother-sister chatting. When they had begun to excavate among the lettuce, arugula, carrot
s and such, Jesus broke his silence, looking across the table at Philly from his place behind one of the chairs that hadn’t been pulled out from the table.

  “You’ll need to hurry, Philly. Your time with your grandma won’t be what it’s meant to be, if you take your leisure at lunch,” he said.

  This counterpoint to the mood of the morning, and the light talk at lunch, raised Philly’s shields. He had never transitioned well between activities or attitudes. Visiting Grandma would be serious, but not traumatic, he expected, since his ma wouldn’t be there.

  Reading Philly’s silent objection, amidst his increasingly sullen chewing, Jesus insisted. “It will go much better for her, and for you, if you get there in the next twenty-five minutes,” he said, adding precision to his instructions.

  Eileen had stopped eating and sipped her white wine with recreational savor. Philly would have to say something to her if they were going to follow Jesus’s direction. He suddenly resented Jesus there, interrupting his Saturday ease, obviously carrying some contrary agenda. He just looked at Jesus and chewed another mouthful of lettuce, dressing dripping down his chin.

  Eileen laughed at her kid brother. “Still a slob.”

  “Hey, I just dripped a little. I was never a slob.”

  And the repartee continued, friendly and fraternal, and shutting Jesus out. Philly looked at his salad or at Eileen, avoiding the man across the table. But he was not able to keep it up for long. After ten minutes or more, he finally said something to Eileen.

  “Hey, you don’t think Ma is heading for the hospital this afternoon, do ya?”

  Eileen shrugged, still enjoying her salad, not yet to the obligatory exercise part of attempting to consume so much greenery.

  “’Cause, I got this feeling that we should get moving, to make sure we get some time with Grandma, in case Ma’s gonna show up,” he said. His tone, however, lacked the sincerity that Eileen expected of Philly.