When I Close My Eyes

by Elizabeth Musser

  ———

  Paige’s voice came in and out. She used to love to recite poetry with me. We memorized Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and beautiful passages of Scripture. But after The Awful Year, she rarely recited anything at all.

  A shadow passed across my mind, and I prayed, “Lord Jesus, care for my Paige. Help her find her way. Help her.” I thought I was praying, but I couldn’t hear the sound of my words.

  The Awful Year—what was that? Was it a poem that Paige wrote? I tried to think of the present. Hannah was here, but she was supposed to be in France. I knew that. But Paige seemed stuck in my mind as a little girl, a little girl who wrote mystery stories and quoted Madeleine L’Engle.

  Then she was holding Hannah’s hand and saying in that sober, serious way of hers, “This is an Awful Year, Hannie. Nothing but an Awful Year.” What did that mean? I had no idea.

  HENRY

  I drove like a madman toward Asheville, everything messed up in my mind. I had to kill Miz Bourdillon! I didn’t even want to anymore, but I knew I had to do it. Both of my guns were ready, but my hands were shaking like crazy, which wasn’t any good.

  “You gotta do what you gotta do.” Pa’s words kept on echoing in my mind.

  I turned on the radio, and it was still on Lib’s favorite station. A preacher was reading from the Bible. Gospel of St. Matthew, but some modern version, sounded like to me. I concentrated real hard on what he was saying.

  “Later when Jesus was eating supper at Matthew’s house with his close followers, a lot of disreputable characters came and joined them. When the Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into Jesus’ followers. ‘What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and riffraff?’

  “Jesus, overhearing, shot back, ‘Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what this Scripture means: “I’m after mercy, not religion.” I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.’”

  It was just a lot of noise in my brain. I needed to talk to Miz Bourdillon, see if she could forgive me, so maybe God wouldn’t punish me by letting Jase die.

  I didn’t want to kill her anymore, but I had to get the money and pay Nick to protect my boy. I tried to think what to do, what to do, but my head felt like it was splitting in half. Finally I pulled off at a rest stop and sat in the car.

  Birch! I’d call Birch, and he’d tell me what to do.

  But he didn’t answer his cell, and I didn’t want to leave him a message asking if I should kill Miz Bourdillon. So I sat in the car for a while and drifted off to sleep, which was about the only way I was gonna find any peace from the noise in my head.

  PAIGE

  The doctor was making his rounds at ten that night, his eyes still bright, still moving with a nervous energy while I could barely stifle a yawn. But I had nervous energy too! Drake’s proclamation had come totally out of nowhere. We’d walked back to his car hand in hand, both in shock. I certainly didn’t have the mental reserves to process what had just happened, and Drake didn’t say anything else.

  Now he, Daddy, Hannah, Aunt Kit, and I were gathered in Momma’s room.

  Dr. Moore stared down at Momma. “Josephine, Josephine, can you see my finger?”

  Momma’s eyes followed his right hand as he slowly moved it from left to right.

  Then, with the same hand, he took hold of Momma’s hand and asked, “Can you squeeze my hand?” He chuckled. “That’s a good grip, Josephine.” He looked over his shoulder, nodding to all of us.

  “Can you tell me where you live, Josephine?” He bent down low, his ear almost touching Momma’s parched lips. To our shock, those lips moved, and a garbled sound escaped. We all laughed at that.

  Hope! It surged up in my heart, making me feel giddy and buzzed. Dr. Moore continued talking to us as he directed us into the hall and away from Momma’s hearing.

  “Josephine is keeping eye contact briefly. You saw that she followed my finger with her eyes. And she responded to my command by squeezing my hand. These are very good signs. She also seems to distinguish where sounds are coming from, she’s showing emotion, and she’s trying to vocalize. Be very careful to notice when she is tracking—when she watches you as you move around the room or turns her head toward you when she sees you or hears your voice.”

  I wanted to hug Dr. Moore, but refrained. Such good news! Daddy shook the doctor’s hand and murmured, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  To which Dr. Moore responded, “You don’t need to thank me. Thank Josephine. She’s the one doing all the work.”

  As the doctor left us in the hallway, Daddy’s slumped shoulders straightened a little. We were all yawning.

  “Go home, Daddy,” Hannah said. “With this great news, surely you can rest a little. Aunt Kit, you too.”

  Daddy nodded and said, “Hannah, I think you should try to get some sleep too, before you fly out tomorrow. You can still visit Momma in the morning before we need to leave for the airport.”

  Hannah looked unconvinced, but then she acquiesced. How I didn’t want her to leave! I needed to tell her about my walk by the river with Drake. Tell her that she’d been right all along.

  “Drake and I will stay here with Momma,” I said.

  I glanced up at him to be sure, and he nodded and smiled.

  JOSEPHINE

  2007 . . . Drake, still dressed in his cross-country uniform, lay sprawled on the couch. “Dad had an affair! An affair! And my mom’s losing it. They fight all the time. Warren and Alex came home from college last weekend and just about freaked out. Smith and I, well, we just lock ourselves in our rooms till they calm down. And it feels like, even though I’m the youngest, I’ve got to be in charge of the family now.”

  Josephine remembered that feeling all too well.

  “It feels so heavy. So dark and heavy.”

  Poor Drake. He had a sensitive side that neither of his parents really understood. Ginnie believed in hard work and few hugs and Bert . . . She sighed. Bert wanted an athlete for a son, not an engineer. A football player, not a runner.

  “You have to learn how to carry the burden, Drake, by giving it to the Lord. He carries it. It’s too heavy for us.”

  “How?” he begged, his voice so anguished and angry. “I’m mad at my parents, and I don’t tend to pay much attention to God right now. He certainly isn’t paying attention to us.”

  “Oh, but He is.”

  “How?”

  “He’s letting you vent to me.” She took a deep breath and said, “Drake, I’ve struggled with depression most of my life. Oh, we didn’t call it that back when I was a child and a teenager. But I recognize the signs in you. I tried so hard to carry my family, and I had a faith that sometimes made it all the more complicated. As though it was my Christian duty to figure everything out and make things better. But it didn’t work. I just kept slipping further into that hole in my head, and my parents and sister and others were too occupied with their own struggles to see how it affected me. But it did.”

  “What happened?”

  “I begged God for help. And not more than a few days later—after I had been literally weeping on my knees before the Lord—I met a very wise young woman. We were on a ski retreat. She was probably in her early thirties, and I was a sophomore in college, so it scared me to death to say anything. But she was an artist and exuded compassion. And I just felt so strongly in my spirit that God had put me in her path or her in my path, however that works.”

  “And?”

  “She helped me find help. Helped me see how to let the burden go. Helped me redirect my spiraling thoughts.”

  “Did she help you plug up the hole?”

  “She pointed me to the One who could do that.”

  “And did it work?”

  “Our lives are a journey, Drake. A beautiful and excruciating journey filled with different seasons. In that season of my life, thanks to that dear woman and a few others, I got some tools—I call them t
ools, maybe God’s toolbox—to deal with the depression better. It didn’t go away exactly, but I could recognize it better, could prepare myself.” She struggled to admit the next thing. “And Drake, I had to let my family go. I loved them, I was there for them in many ways. But I couldn’t carry them.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Let’s just say I learned to set boundaries—to distinguish what was my part and what wasn’t. It certainly didn’t make everything better. Not nice and neat. But I survived.”

  She tried to read the expressions on his young face: hope, defiance, perplexity. She so dearly wanted to leave Drake with hope. Hope. She would not tell him that the depression often returned. Nor would she admit the long and painful journey with Kit. Those were true, but so was what she was telling him right now. He could have hope.

  HENRY

  Woke up feeling real groggy. I had a couple of hours to listen to the CDs of Miz Bourdillon’s book as I drove to Asheville. It kept me kinda concentrated and awake and made me forget about Nick’s threats.

  This book was about a rich society lady back during the Civil War who grew up on a plantation in Georgia. Her father owned lots of slaves, but she herself was against slavery and stood up for the black people. And it was about a slave who’d been treated something awful, like a piece of trash.

  And there she went again, Miz Bourdillon, writing a story that reminded me of myself.

  All my life I was nothing but a piece of trash. Ma and Pa never meant me to be born. Just two screwed up teenagers screwing around, literally, and here I came. So they went on and got married, and there I was, messing up all their plans.

  I don’t know if God is real. But if He is, I think He had a real good idea about family. Imagine me saying that with all the horror of my own. What I mean is no matter that Ma didn’t want to get pregnant and sure didn’t want to marry Pa—once I was born, she just somehow loved me. She wasn’t no tender mother or anything, but one time when Pa was at his worst with me, Ma came in and screamed at him, “You stop it right now, Amos! Now!”

  And he was just glaring at her and holding my arm like as to break it, and says, “Why?”

  And she was crying and then begging, on her knees begging, “Because I love him, Amos. I love my boy.” And Pa just let me go, dropped me to the floor. And I don’t remember what happened after that.

  But most of the time I was just in the way. And even though I liked going to school and I did okay, Pa didn’t care one bit about learning. The only books in our house were Ma’s romance novels and Pa’s girly magazines. I looked at them a lot when I was real young and then wished I hadn’t, because afterward I felt all dirty.

  Guess most of my life I’ve felt dirty, like someone left over or a mistake or worse. A sinner, that’s what the pastor at Libby’s church calls people like me. He says, “A sinner like you,” and looks out at the people in the pews, and then he whispers, “A sinner like me.” He says we’re all the same before God. Sinners in need of God’s grace.

  Well, I don’t know about that.

  But listening to this book, boy, did it have me crying. It was just like what I’d heard that radio preacher say, and just like what Jesus was doing in the Gospel he read! Just exactly! You know how funny that is, when you read something and then next thing you know, you’re seeing it again somewhere? Libby doesn’t believe in coincidence. She says it’s God’s Spirit speaking, trying to get your attention.

  Well, something got my attention, because Miz Bourdillon’s heroine was doing that exact same thing. It was after the Civil War, and she was this real good person that everybody liked. I think the lady was head of some Southern women’s group for rich white people. Anyway, she had a meal, and she invited the poor men who was all maimed from the war and some of the local prostitutes and their pimps. She didn’t call them pimps, but I knew that was what they were. And she invited former slaves who were having a bad time, and she even invited a man from town who was in the KKK. He was a bigwig in the community and boy, was I scared that man was just gonna go on and start hanging the former slaves—she called them freedmen, but didn’t sound to me like they were very free.

  Anyway, it was clear what she was showing. Like if it had been today, the lady would have been inviting gays and immigrants and refugees and religious people too.

  She filled up her house with all those people. And it wasn’t because she felt sorry for them.

  She was real clever, Miz Bourdillon, the way she wrote it. Everyone that lady invited she’d gotten to know a little bit somewhere in the story. And there were some highfalutin rich folks who were about as mad as Pa got sometimes, yelling at her and saying she was a piece of scum, but then there were about half those rich ladies who went right ahead and helped her with the meal and sat there in between the different “outsiders”—that’s what I’m calling them, borrowing it from St. Matthew. Miz Bourdillon didn’t give any labels at all. And the thing about how she wrote the book was that you just believed her. And you felt all warm and cozy inside. And I got tears in my eyes, too, because I knew, I just knew, that I’d have been invited, too, if I’d been lucky enough to cross that woman’s path.

  That wasn’t gonna happen, of course, because it was just a story, but I reckoned something even ten times better could happen. I could talk to the author herself. Because there wasn’t any way she could write something that pretty and touching if she didn’t believe it herself. Leastways I didn’t think she could. If she believed it and if it was true, well, maybe she could forgive me and maybe Jesus could forgive me, too, and wash away all the layers of dirt that had been clinging to me just about from the day I was born.

  JOSEPHINE

  Paige was talking softly. “Momma, something amazing happened tonight. I-I don’t even know how to say it.”

  I opened my eyes and slowly, slowly turned my head so I could see her. She sat huddled in the chair, a fleece around her, her thick chestnut hair falling over her shoulders. She was grasping my hand, and maybe she had dozed off, but after a moment she straightened in the chair. “Momma! Look at you! Your eyes are open again. Oh, Momma! Can you squeeze my hand?”

  I tried, and I must have succeeded because she said, “Great! Great!” But then she was blubbering like a baby, and my Paige never cried.

  “Drake and I left the hospital earlier and got dinner at Chai Pani—you know, that great little Indian restaurant in town? And we were talking about so many things . . . hard things, but then something amazing happened. He just all of a sudden admitted that he liked me, Momma! I mean, liked me in a romantic way. Isn’t that amazing? Hannah had been teasing me about it, but I didn’t believe her for a second, and then it came out, and I don’t even know what to think. He said he wants to wait for me. As in marriage. I’ll be eighteen in two months. Am I crazy, Momma? Did he tell you this?”

  I was smiling in my head and heart, but I don’t think she could tell. Dear Paige. She had a way of going on and on and on when she got excited. Yes, Drake had told me of his affection for Paige, more than once. I was sure of that. When he told me, I could not remember. But I had read his eyes when he talked about Paige, and it was pure love.

  And now he had declared it to my daughter. I was actually chuckling to myself. At least it felt like a low rumble beneath all the tubes. She kept talking, and I wanted to stay awake, but something kept pulling me down and away.

  HENRY

  I sped on through the night, praying I’d make it before my boy died and asking God why in the world he let my boy have that operation if he was gonna die one way or another. I drove faster and faster and felt the adrenaline and everything pulsing, pulsing.

  Had to talk to Miz Bourdillon and explain about everything. I was sure she’d understand, and then Jase would get better, and I wouldn’t ever kill anyone again.

  Now I knew, way down in my bones, what I had to do. Once I got it figured out, I felt kinda peaceful, like I’d been praying for. Funny how all the sudden it seemed like I could be a better fath
er to my Jase than Pa was to me. I could almost see Jesus standing by my boy’s hospital bed and helping me talk all nice and soft and convincing to him. I could be different with my boy. The dirt could be washed away, and I could change.

  I was thinking about these things, pretty excited, when I finally pulled into the hospital parking lot. That bright neon sign was flashing the hospital’s name, but for me it was like an angel flashing a message, and that message was that Jesus would invite me to eat with Him and so would Miz Bourdillon. And all the sudden I just felt flooded with that thing called hope!

  I was gonna be different—not dirty, but clean. Even with Jase doing so poorly and Nick threatening and all. If only I could see Miz Bourdillon, I just knew that she was gonna forgive me, and everything was gonna be okay after all.

  Or was it? Even if she forgave me, the police weren’t about to, were they? And if I didn’t kill her, well, then whoever hired me was maybe gonna kill my boy and Libs.

  As I parked the truck, I heard my phone ringing in my bag, but I didn’t stop to answer. I rushed into that hospital with my head exploding with possibility, Glock in my belt, hidden under my flannel shirt in case I needed it to convince someone I was serious. I hurried on up to the third floor and found Libby in the waiting room. When she saw me, she about fainted.

  “Henry! Henry, what’s the matter with you? What’s the matter?”

  Why was she looking at me like that, when I had it all figured out in my mind about peace and hope? I started feeling queasy again with a little panic mixed in. “Gotta see my boy! He still alive, my boy?”

  Libby was crying and holding on to me. “Yes, yes, he’s still alive, Henry. But you’ve got to calm down. You have to be calm before we see him.” Her hands started trembling as she brushed the hair out of my eyes. “You look like a wild man, babe.”