Gladys noticed a niggling feeling that there might be more of those burdens to set down, but Jesus wasn’t saying anything about them, and she was ready for sleep. The trip down memory lane had taken more energy than she would have imagined.
For the next two days, Jesus accompanied Gladys through the routines of her day, even helping with some of the preparations for Katie’s arrival on Friday. The two of them pulled the new TV and Blu-Ray player from their boxes and set their instruction booklets together. There was no question of Gladys knowing how to set them up, but she wondered why Jesus wouldn’t know such things.
“It’s not that I can’t do it,” Jesus said, when she finally asked him, Tuesday at supper. “But I know it will be good for Katie to help out her grandma and get a sense of her power in the world.”
“Power? An eleven-year-old?” Gladys said, before taking a sip of water from the bumpy caramel-colored glass by her plate.
“Almost twelve,” Jesus said, with exaggerated emphasis, the way they both could imagine Katie saying it.
“Yes, almost twelve,” Gladys said. She remembered some things about her life at twelve. Those were the golden days, Leah there to play with, to confide in. Gladys wasn’t aware of having power at twelve, but her older cousin certainly had the magical powers of imagination. Until they took her away, institutionalized her, Leah seemed invulnerable. She could not be contained, because she travelled in her imagination, where no one else could touch her. They couldn’t touch her both in the sense of her superiority to any of the people Gladys knew, and in the sense that, in her imagination, Leah remained beyond the reach of the people in her life, some of whom she deeply longed to escape.
One of the reasons Gladys cringed at Harry’s occasional drinking bout with the men at work, throughout their marriage, was her uncle Roy, Leah’s father. He drank and didn’t try to hide it, in contrast to most of the people in the family. She had always felt that Leah has hiding from Roy, when she escaped the house and the farm to be with Gladys, and to lead a tour of some far-off place and its exotic story. As a twelve and thirteen-year-old, Gladys lacked the worldly experience to guess what it was that Leah was trying to escape. Later in life, Gladys avoided thinking about Leah, too hurt by Leah’s disappearance from her life. Only lately, when questions of her sanity had preoccupied her, did Gladys begin to think about Leah and the way she was confiscated from her.
As they collected the dishes from the table and started the water running in the right-hand side of her double sink, Gladys was thinking about Leah’s urge to escape. Jesus responded to her thoughts.
“You didn’t think of it as escaping, back then,” Jesus said.
Gladys, startled slightly by Jesus’s intrusion into her thoughts again, stopped pouring soap into the dishwater and tried to remember when she had added the word escape to her description of Leah’s rampant imagination. Then she remembered.
“It was my mother that said that,” Gladys said. “If I ever mentioned Leah, when I was a teenager, she would say something about her escaping into her imagination and finally not being able to come back.” Gladys stood still, remembering bits of various conversations. “That was her explanation, when I was eighteen or so, for what made Leah go crazy. But she never said what Leah was escaping from.”
Jesus gently nudged Gladys aside and pulled his sleeves up above his elbows, deftly rolling them, so they wouldn’t slide down into the water. So captivated by her complex of memories and questions, Gladys, the compulsive cleaner, didn’t even resist being replaced at the dishes. She rested her left hand on the Formica counter top and stared at the china teapot from the set that Harry had bought her for their 25th Wedding Anniversary. She was seeing her mother in the farmhouse kitchen, before Gladys married Harry, and she was feeling a question grow up inside her.
“I will tell you, if you really want to know,” Jesus said, busy with the dishes but looking at Gladys as much as the dish drainer on his opposite side.
Gladys didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. She turned her head only far enough to stare now at Jesus’s skilled and intelligent hands, sorting through silverware, plates, glasses and bowls, scrubbing and rinsing with steady and effortless pace.
Her mind tripped over why she hadn’t asked about Leah before, not even asking herself, not even wondering.
“Some things are very hard to face,” Jesus said, simply and sympathetically, his voice just loud enough to overpower the sound of the water and the dishes.
Gladys started to shake, first her head, then her hands, and then her whole body. Jesus grabbed the hand towel from next to the sink and dried his hands with one motion. Then he wrapped one damp forearm around her waist, and grabbed one of her shaking hands with his other. It was almost a dancer’s grip. And he took the lead, stepping her smoothly across the kitchen tiles to her seat at the table. He pulled the chair out with one foot and settled her into the chair. But Gladys didn’t just sit down, she collapsed. She lay her head on the table, on her white and yellow, daisy print place matt, and she released another torrent of sorrow that she didn’t even know she contained.
Jesus pulled a chair up close to Gladys. He wrapped one arm over her back and the other around her head, where it lay on the table. Having Jesus’s arms physically around her as she wept there into her placemat, did little to add to the uniqueness of the experience. She had not wept for Leah like that since she was thirteen, had never wept for the torture that drove Leah out of her mind, and certainly had never lain her head on her kitchen table like that. When she thought about it later, she wondered at how she had gone so long through her life without venting her sadness over so many losses. And, of course, she wondered at how Jesus had managed to break the dam for all of this emotional purging.
When, after ten minutes, she came up for air, Gladys didn’t notice the mess she had made of her cheerful placemat. She only noticed the peaceful space that Jesus wrapped around her with his arms and his close attention to her every feeling and every need. He handed her the tissue box from the other side of the refrigerator, though Gladys couldn’t think when he had a chance to pick that up.
Wiping at her face with three tissues at once, Gladys said, “I don’t need to know the details of what she went through.” Though that was not a question, she looked at Jesus for affirmation after she said it.
He nodded. Then he pulled up close and wrapped both arms around her again. This time she could lean her head on his shoulder as she recovered.
They both breathed an expansive sigh and hung on for a little longer.
Chapter 17
DREAMING
Gladys had never been the sort of person that paid much attention to her dreams. Most of the time, she didn’t even remember whether she dreamed after she woke up. But, that night, in the middle of the week, she dreamed a dream like none she ever experienced. She knew it was unique, because this dream was one that she would never forget.
This dream began with Gladys lying in her bed, awaking to a sense that there was work to be done, in spite of it being the middle of the night. She got out of bed, still in her flannel nightgown, and headed to the kitchen, her operational headquarters on most days. She was standing at the sink in the dark, doing dishes, and looking out on the way the full moon illuminated her back yard. In that dream, nighttime flowers were blooming in the moonlight, and Gladys noted how strange it was.
“Harry, you should see the moonlight on the garden. The flowers are all purple and blue, no matter what color they are in daylight,” she said.
Just as she was about to rebuke herself for talking to Harry, she heard a noise in the living room. It sounded like someone sitting in the recliner. She dried her hands and went to check if it was Jesus sitting out there, instead of staying close to her as he usually did.
When she stepped into her dream living room, there, in the rocker-recliner, sat a familiar figure. In his sixties, Harry started to lose some of his hair, but he tried to keep his style from the 1950s. The result was a
wave of hair in the front, interrupted by a flat spot through which shown his shiny scalp, and then the requisite swoop of hair in the back, just overlapping his collar. In the dream, he wore his overalls, as if he had just come in from mowing the lawn or pulling weeds. Retirement from sales meant a second career as a small farmer, for Harry.
Unlike Gladys, Harry had grown up in town. His father had been the owner and manager of a car repair garage in Fairbury. Harry was a townie, and most of the townies looked down on the “clodhoppers” from out on the farms. But Harry was different, at least where Gladys was concerned. His best friends among the boys were all kids who lived in town, riding bikes on the red brick streets, buying sodas at the drug store and playing baseball at the school yard. As soon as he noticed girls, as more than an annoyance or a target for teasing, he noticed Gladys. Harry was an only child; he had no sisters. Gladys represented an alien species that he seemed to suddenly discover at about age twelve. For the first couple of years, she didn’t know about Harry’s crush. He was shy around Gladys—though two years older—and he didn’t resort to pigtail pulling and mud puddle splashing, that some of the other boys did, when trying to get a girl’s attention.
By the time Gladys reached twelve, and started caring more about what she wore and how she did her hair, Harry was completely smitten and couldn’t abide his own crippling shyness. It was this motivation that drove him to read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which he had seen displayed at the drug store. He didn’t buy it when his friends were around, of course. That would reveal more than his adolescent self dared to risk. And he didn’t ask his parents to buy it for him, because he feared even their unsympathetic teasing.
As for so many others, throughout the history of that book, the Carnegie approach launched Harry not just into his first romance, but into an eventual career in sales. And, though he was never a super salesman, making millions, he crafted a career of reading people and reaching them where they stood.
In her dream, Gladys looked at Harry, as he appeared in his early days of retirement, smiling at her from his favorite chair. “Are you really here, old man?”
“You’re dreaming, Gladdy. I am really here in your dream.”
Gladys laughed. “You waitin’ for me to bring you a beer?”
“No. This time, I was waiting for you to come out here and talk to me.”
“That’s new, you never did that before you were dead,” she said, only the slightest hint of rebuke in her voice.
“Actually, I did that more than you knew, because you didn’t come and check what I was waitin’ for out here, or in there.” He gestured toward the bedroom.
Gladys glanced toward the bedroom. She had always known that she wasn’t everything Harry wanted in a wife, especially in the bedroom. She had never wondered if she should make more of an effort, if she should educate herself better. In her generation, a woman just didn’t read books about something like that, and couples certainly didn’t see a family therapist for such things. Like most of the houses up and down both sides of the street, their house provided shelter and space to share, and that was all the inhabitants expected.
“You expected more?” Gladys said. She wasn’t starting a fight, of course, she was just taking this late opportunity to ask what she should have asked all those years ago.
He shook his head slowly. “How could I, after all the times I let you down, after all the ways I hurt you.”
“You never hit me or anything like that.”
“Sure, but my words were sticks and stones sometimes. I took things out on you that I shouldn’t have.”
Gladys looked at her husband and best friend, and she loved him.
“I forgive you, old man.”
“Good,” he said. “You deserve some rest.”
“Rest?”
“Yeah, it was hard for you to pretend that things were okay with us, the way your family expected and everyone else, in church and all. Just ‘cause I didn’t hit you, they wouldn’t have listened if you had complained.”
“I never complained.”
“I should have let you complain. I should have listened to some correction,” he said.
“No regrets, though,” she said. “It’s too late for you.”
“Yeah, but not for you. You can carry on for the both of us. You hardly needed me for anything, anyway,” he said, an approving smile on his face.
When she woke up the next morning, Gladys felt a truer sense of loss than the day Harry died. That dark day had been full of worries and distractions about pleasing other people, her kids, the people at church, Harry’s friends. But, at the end of that dream, she suddenly found a sediment of sadness in the corners and cracks of her heart. For the fourth time since Jesus showed up at her house, she cried a purging rain of tears. This time, that rain fell steady but straight, no wind to whip it, or to rattle the windows and doors.
When she opened her eyes, Jesus sat in the chair next to her dresser again.
“Did you do that?” She didn’t even bother to sit up, just addressing him from where she lay, next to a little pile of spent tissues.
“Mostly, you did it,” he said. “Once you open the door, the light and fresh air just keep coming in.”
“The door’s still open?”
“Apparently.”
“Thanks.” She took a deep breath, convincing herself that it was time to get up, instead of going back to sleep, as her body seemed to prefer.
As she swung her feet to the floor to get out of bed for real this time, Jesus stood and took her hand, helping her to her feet. She patted him on the shoulder, glad to see him for another day.
Chapter 18
CHECKING
On each of the next two days, before Katie arrived, Gladys received a momentous phone call. On Wednesday, Patty called, just to check on plans for the weekend, or so she said. And, on Thursday, Jim Heskett called, also just checking in.
Gladys and Jesus were dusting the whole house from top to bottom, room to room, when Patty called. Gladys wore a carpenters’ sanding mask to protect her from the wake of tiny floating particles wafted around them. Jesus didn’t seem to be bothered by them. When she asked him about it, he just said something about the Kingdom of Heaven that she didn’t comprehend. She had learned to move on when he said things like that, encouraged by his patience and approval even when she lacked understanding.
Pulling off her mask and fluffing up her hair, out of habit, where the string had left a temporary dent, Gladys picked up the phone.
“Hi, Mom,” said Patty, after Gladys answered.
“Dear!” Gladys said, with celebration in her voice.
“You sound chipper,” Patty said. “Not sneaking the cooking sherry are you,” she said, joking. Patty knew that her mother had stayed a teetotaler, even though her father strayed once in a while.
Gladys laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not that.” Without planning one way or the other, Gladys simply stepped out onto the path that lay wide open before her. “But there is something that has made all the difference in the world,” she said, by way of introduction. Though she was never a maven of marketing, her opening blurb was a good prompt for Patty’s curiosity.
“More faith healers?” Patty said. She was kidding, in a feisty and contentious mood, but trying to start out light.
“I don’t need a faith healer, with Jesus right here, now do I?” Gladys said.
“Jesus right there?”
“Yes, he’s been with me for days and days now. Oh, I don’t know how long it’s been. You remember about my legs being healed, of course. Well, he did that and he has stayed with me to talk and to help me out around the house. But I guess it’s mostly just to be with me and talk about important things, like forgiveness.”
Jesus pulled a chair over next to the phone and Gladys nodded her thanks. She sat down, and he leaned against the counter, a pose Gladys was getting used to.
After a perplexed pause, Patty replied. “So, you’re talki
ng about praying?”
Gladys hummed a second. “Well, if praying is just talking to God and Jesus, then I guess you could call it that. I just think of it as talking to him, ‘cause he’s right here where I can see and hear him.” Gladys waited for Patty to respond, but accepted the extended pause as an invitation to continue.
“I wasn’t sure how to tell you before, I mean when my legs were healed. But it’s been very surprising. I see and hear Jesus just like if you were here visiting me. And I was thinking it meant I was off my nut, or something, maybe advance menopause, or such. But I talked to my pastor, and he sent me to a priest at the retreat center near here, and then I met with Sister Alison, who’s gonna be my spiritual director from now on . . . though I never even heard of that before.”
Thus, in two breaths, Gladys spilled her secret to the one person in the world she least expected would understand.
“Are you becoming Catholic?” Patty said. She was looking for a category she could recognize. “Crazy” had been her top candidate until the mention of a spiritual director. Patty had actually heard of that. She worked for a man, many years ago, who talked about his Holy Spirit weekends and times with his spiritual director. He was Catholic.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. Then she looked at Jesus, scrunching up her face at a question that hadn’t occurred to her before. She asked him the question. “Am I becoming Catholic?”
Jesus tipped his head from side to side slightly, as if the answer could go either way, but he said, “Not in the way she means.”
“Wait,” said Patty. “Are you talking to Jesus right now?”
“Yes.”
“And he answered you?”
“Of course. He always answers me, though sometimes he warns me that the answer may not be to my liking.”
“So, why didn’t I hear his voice when he answered?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s why I went to check this out with my pastor and such. You see, no one else can see and hear him, like I can. He just came to see me, I guess.”
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 17