Though she still spoke to Harry, out of habit and not dementia, Gladys was used to being alone. She was used to being the only living thing in her house, the only source of organic sound, the only one casting a moving shadow. That was her new normal, the life she had come to accept.
But something had changed. She didn’t feel alone. And she didn’t know why.
Against every experience of her life up to that point, Gladys felt no fear. It was as if the presence of an unseen person in the house was good news, that the unseen visitor offered her only hope and happiness, and not threat or pain. She stood watching the rocker settle down and thought about her inexplicable calm.
Then she did the only thing that made sense to her. “Harry? Is that you, you old ghost?”
A voice answered her from the hallway, just outside her bedroom. “No, Gladdy, it’s not Harry, he’s getting singing lessons from some angels right now.”
Even more than the surprise of a voice in her house, Gladys recoiled at what that voice said. Though she hadn’t confessed it aloud to anyone, she had always doubted that Harry had made it to Heaven. A church-going man only as much as it was required of him, Harry never impressed Gladys with any real devotion to God.
“But God was always devoted to Harry,” the man’s voice said, growing louder as he approached.
Gladys raised her hand to her mouth, which stood wide open, though not as wide as her pale eyes. There, in her hallway, stood a man, with a beard and long hair, looking just like she imagined Jesus would look, prompted by more than a few Sunday school pictures. Long oatmeal-colored robe, covered by a loose sort of blue coat, and sandals on his feet, the strange man had been perfectly costumed for a passion play, such as she had only seen once in her life, in Branson, Missouri, when she was twelve years old.
As if reading her memory, the olive-skinned man, with bright smiling eyes, said, “That was a beautiful play, wasn’t it?”
“Who . . . .” Gladys couldn’t find enough words to assemble a sentence, or even add a good punctuation mark.
“Well, I’m certainly not Harry,” said the uninvited guest.
Gladys found her voice. "Why are you haunting my house?"
“Haunting?” He said, not surprised as much as seeking an alternative. “You know, I never liked that ‘Holy Ghost’ label.” He smiled at her and then took half a step forward.
“You could look at it this way, I've been inside you for a long time, I’ve just escaped, for a change.”
If Gladys were the sort of person who stopped to imagine what she would do if an intruder entered her house, if she had included in that scenario a moment where the intruder stepped closer to her, alone there—defenseless—she would have assumed that she would be terrified. But that step, erasing distance between them, did not inflate her fear, for she felt no fear, only wonder and doubt.
He seemed to be there. He seemed to be real. He seemed as real as that lamp he was standing next to now, the lamp she got when her mother died twelve years ago, her mother’s favorite lamp. It was standing in her house now, and apparently, so was Jesus.
“Am I dead?” Gladys said, her voice full of weary resignation, as if it was too late to change anything.
The stranger laughed and stepped still closer. “You’re not dead, Gladdy. I don’t come for the dead. That’s somebody else you’re thinking of.”
Gladys wished she had her cane. She generally didn’t carry it when in the house, taking her time, knowing her steps would fall on flat carpet or smooth linoleum. But the floor seemed less smooth just then.
She found her voice again. “I’m not dead. And you’re here. You are really here.”
“I am always here, wherever ‘here’ is for you, Dear.”
In that imagined scenario, where the burglar catches her by surprise and then walks toward her, he doesn’t look at her like that. That imagined intruder doesn’t look at her as if he has always known her, as if he knows her from the inside out, and as if he loves her. Then, just to destroy the last jagged edges of that imagined encounter, he made this real encounter much more real. He stepped right up to her and put his hand on her cheek, and he leaned down, and he kissed her full on the mouth.
Gladys had never fainted in all her life, not the time she saw Randy Miller fall off the barn roof and break his leg, so that the bone stuck through his pants, bloody and jagged, or the time her father’s hired man fell into the circular saw, and shaved a great slice of his forehead and cheek off. That time she just wondered how he hadn’t hurt his eye. She didn’t faint through giving birth to two children, one of them a nine pound infant born from her smallish body. Gladys had never fainted at any pain or shock in all her life. But she fainted at that kiss.
When she awoke, she lay on the couch. That too was something she had never done before. Laying on the couch was for the children, when they were sick or injured, a place to lay where mother could tend to their needs and they could, perhaps, see TV during a prolonged illness. But Gladys had never been the patient on the couch, never the one ministered to, always the attending physician or attentive nurse.
He sat on the couch next to her, a cool hand on her forehead. Fainting had not freed her from her mirage. She expected a headache after fainting, it seemed a reasonable consequence, though she had no personal experience to feed that expectation.
“You’re still here,” she said, her voice croaky.
“And so are you,” he said in return.
“You’re him, then?”
The stranger raised one eyebrow slightly, pulled half a smile and said, “I am him.”
“Jesus?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I don’t understand this. Why are you here like this? Why now?”
“Why not?”
This might have seemed the sort of wise response that would silence all further questions, but Gladys didn’t give up that easily. Once she reconnected her usual meter for measuring sense and reason, she decided to sit up and get a better answer. Jesus used one hand to help her sit and then got up to allow her to swing her legs slowly off the couch. He crossed the room and sat down in Harry’s rocker-recliner.
“You were sitting there before, weren’t you?” Gladys said, recalling her earlier hallucination.
He nodded again. “I didn’t want to startle you so much by just popping in. You needed a bit of warning that you weren’t alone in the house. You were thinking that you were alone.”
As she often did while thinking about something, Gladys ran the tip of her tongue in and out of an empty socket where a bottom molar used to be. The dentist had pulled that one. It felt different than the space where a tooth had simply fallen out. If her tongue were sandpaper and that socket were stone, it would be polished shiny by now. She looked at Jesus, sitting in Harry’s chair.
“You said Harry is with the angels now,” Gladys said, reminding herself of another unanswered question.
“And you doubt me more for saying that than for the strangeness of seeing me sitting here in your living room.” Jesus seemed to be finishing her thought, more than challenging her assumptions. His voice remained even, his eyes steady, his head tipped slightly to one side.
“He wasn’t always good to me,” Gladys said. This was something she had never said to any other person, which counted as the third unprecedented experience on that one Sunday afternoon. It was still afternoon. She hadn’t been unconscious for long.
Jesus pursed his lips and nodded very slightly, looking down at his hands. Then he looked into Gladys’s eyes again. “I know,” he said, answering her complaint with sadness weighing down his words. “I have always known.”
Anger stirred inside Gladys, like a testy dog that should have been left to sleep in its dark doghouse, where no one could see him, where no one would fear him. Gladys decided that mean dog should stay in the dark. She closed the door over her anger, again.
“So, you let him into Heaven?” Gladys said. “I bet he was surprised.” Even in the familiar walls o
f her own little house, she felt lost, detached, disconnected from what she thought she knew. She said things she wouldn’t have ever thought to say before.
Jesus shrugged slightly. “He was grateful.”
Now Gladys nodded. Before this visit, she had not been looking for a fight, nor for a digging up of old hurts. Now she was settling back into that resigned place, that place where her heart faded to pale ambiguous colors, blending into her surroundings, invisible to the naked eye. She suspected that Jesus might not let it remain hidden like that, she waited for the next poke from him. But he changed the subject, instead.
“You wonder why you can see me, sitting here in plain sight?”
Gladys raised her eyebrows. The effort of even that small muscular exercise showed her how tired she had suddenly become. She sighed and nodded. “I was wondering.”
Jesus glanced at the painting of an owl that hung above Gladys’s head, and then rested his eyes on her again. “You remember those missionaries to a Muslim country that were at your church last year, the ones who told you about how Muslims were being converted after I appeared to them in a dream or a vision?”
Gladys did remember that. It had caused some controversy in the church, their doctrine not assigning any room for visions and dreams like that. But she could tell that Jesus wasn’t recalling this in order to visit that controversy.
“I remember,” she said, anxious to hear the answer to the question.
“Why do you think I show up in their dreams or in their living rooms?”
Gladys stuck out her lower lip, the way she did when trying to figure out an answer to the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Then she remembered what the missionary had said. “It has something to do with churches and missionaries being illegal in those countries,” she said.
“Yes, that’s what the young man said, the one who couldn’t tell you what country he and his wife were working in, for fear of being banned from going back,” Jesus said. “But, in a way, the answer is simpler than that.”
Her brow now flexing down over her eyes, another unconscious gesture that seemed to require a taxing effort, Gladys tried to anticipate where Jesus was going.
He helped her out, in her weary state. “It’s just that they need me to come and see them in order for them to believe,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get through to anyone.”
Now Gladys was truly confused. How did this answer her question about his appearing in her living room?
Jesus sighed voluminously. “You seem tired,” he said. “Let’s just watch your Sunday shows and then you can get some sleep.
Gladys looked at him for a full ten seconds without saying anything. She was trying to reconcile the Jesus in her living room with the one she would have expected, if she had ever thought to expect him to show up somewhere.
Watching TV?
Gladys’s usual Sunday night programs included one where people bid for stuff left in storage units, and another where people rehabbed someone’s house as a heart-warming surprise. What would Jesus want with watching those, or watching her watch them? Instead of probing around at these questions, she just followed his suggestion. She really was quite tired.
On her way to the channel with the storage container auctions, she passed a splashy introduction to an investigative report about the real historical Jesus. The Jesus sitting across from her laughed so loud that she expected the neighbors across the driveway heard it. This caused Gladys to stop on that channel, though she normally wouldn’t.
“Thanks, Gladdy. We don’t have to watch this,” Jesus said. “It was worth a good laugh, but it won’t be very funny from here on. You can go ahead and watch what you normally would, just like I’m not even here.”
Again, obediently, Gladys fell into her routine, lacking energy to work out an alternative. But, as they watched the drummed-up drama over the relationships among the usual dealers bidding for the contents of that first storage unit, she kept replaying what Jesus had said about watching, “just like I’m not even here.” This spin cycle, followed by a good soak in a growing guilt, effectively ruined the program for Gladys. Jesus, on the other hand, seemed thoroughly engrossed.
“Oh, I knew he was bidding too much for that one,” he said, toward the middle of the show.
When Gladys turned and looked at him, her tired face full of consternation, he smiled at her and winked. Gladys laughed under her breath. And, as they both looked back at the screen, Gladys realized how much she enjoyed the amiable company. She forgot about the guilt she was brewing over ignoring Jesus all the other nights she had watched TV. Instead, she sprouted a small smile over the pleasure of having him reclining in Harry’s old chair, watching the show past his sandaled feet.
Gladys didn’t last long into the second show. It was before her usual bedtime, but she had logged a big day. Going to bed early seemed a spectacular idea. However, it occurred to her that if she fell asleep Jesus might go away, so she hesitated to suggest the early rest.
At the next commercial, Jesus pointed his finger at the TV and muted the advert for hemorrhoid medicine, to answer Gladys’s thoughts. “I’ll still be here in the morning, Gladdy. You should go ahead and sleep,” he said.
Gladys stared at his finger, looked at the remote on the table in front of her, and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t want to say, “how did you do that?” a far too obvious question. And she knew why he did it. But that didn’t drain the wonder out of it.
As Gladys sat staring at the remote, Jesus pointed his finger at the TV again and turned it off. He smiled innocently at Gladys when she looked up at him, her eyebrows stuck at their maximum elevation. Before she said anything, he swung the footrest on his chair down and stood up briskly. He stepped around the coffee table and held his hands out to her. She shook her head as she took his hands and allowed him to help her to her feet.
“You were gonna be pretty tired tonight even before I showed up,” Jesus said, answering a question that Gladys hadn’t even unwrapped yet.
“Yeah, the kids’ visit was a lot of excitement for one day,” she said, turning and heading toward the bedroom. She stopped, however, remembering the light switch on the other side of the living room.
Jesus pointed to the switch and the light went off. Then he looked at his finger and said, “This thing comes in pretty handy.”
He and Gladys laughed together for the first time.
Chapter 4
UNCERTAINTY
When Gladys woke the next morning, she couldn’t remember stirring a single time all night, a very unusual occurrence in her later years. But, then, she also didn’t remember getting ready for bed, though clearly she had exchanged her Sunday slacks and sweater for her flannel nightgown.
She lay on her back for a minute, then threw down the covers so she could do her ankle exercises, twisting and stretching to get them limber before putting any weight on them. As she listened to the usual cracking and popping of her old joints, she thought she heard something from the other room. She dropped her right foot back onto the bed and lay still. That’s when she remembered Jesus in her house. That part wasn’t a dream.
As at his first appearance, Gladys rolled into realization without any accompanying fear. But, this morning, she felt a sharp anxiety in addition to her usual morning hunger. Her mind jumped to a memory of her first year at summer camp.
She was remembering being the only girl in her church that went to camp that year, apart from the Bailey sisters. She had always thought of them as the “bad, bad Bailey sisters,” after her brother dubbed them that. Though he was certainly biased, because of the time they ganged up on him and rubbed his face in the mud during Vacation Bible School, Gladys had always thought of it as their true name. Gladys knew she wasn’t going to pal around with the Bailey sisters, but she didn’t know how she would make friends with girls from other churches, who seemed to travel in tight packs, like meerkats with eyes on a circling eagle. The prospect of greeting Jesus in her house in the morning, fel
t a lot like the social angst of making friends at that summer camp. In her present anxiety, she didn’t remember Wendy Marshall, who became a fast friend that summer and still sent Gladys a Christmas card up to a few years ago.
Jesus knocked on the doorpost to her bedroom. He spoke through the usual gap she left when she went to bed at night, no need really to close her door, but leaving it wide open seeming odd and inappropriate, if not frightening.
“Gladdy? Are you finished with your ankle exercises?” he said, not entering her room uninvited.
Everything about that question stirred objections in Gladys. How is it that this person at her door could know about her ankle exercises and yet not know whether she had finished them that morning? Never a fan of science fiction or fantasy stories, she wasn’t used to adjusting the rules of normal life to fit some alien circumstances. She hadn’t encountered anything even remotely like this strange visit from Jesus, or even the appearance of a figment of her imagination that had convinced her he was Jesus.
“Can I come in?” he said, when she didn’t answer.
Gladys grabbed the corner of her blanket and threw it over her legs. The best she could do in a hurry. “Okay,” she said, a bit louder than she intended.
Jesus entered with his right hand over his eyes. “I’m not looking,” he said with a grin on his face. He walked to the chair to the right of Gladys’s bed and sat down where she usually sat to put on her socks and shoes. When he was seated, he said, “Can I look now?”
Gladys crossed her arms over her chest and said uncertainly, “Yes.”
He dropped his hand and looked into her startled, child-like face, which said, “What do we do now?” without having to vocalize the sentiment.
“I think we need to talk,” he said.
Gladys scooted herself up in the bed a bit, so she could prop her head against the headboard and see him more comfortably. Jesus reached down and flipped her extra pillow up off the floor, where it often landed during the night. Gladys gathered it in and slipped it behind her head awkwardly, taking three attempts to get comfortable.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 3