Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  All of that was tainted for both Katie and Gladys, with the tense prospect of Patty’s arrival in a couple of hours. Not only would that mark the end of another precious visit, but it would also certainly raise the blood pressure of everyone in the house, everyone except Jesus, of course. But they were both surprised by what they found when they opened the door, to welcome Patty and Derek, who were both smiling and full of energy.

  Derek was a tall, athletically-built man, still resisting the spare-tire syndrome, though showing gray at his temples, and along the line of the short-cropped hair above his forehead. His face tan from skiing in the winter, as well as watching soccer matches that spring, he looked the same as Gladys remembered, but older than Katie remembered. Patty hung onto his hand, more affectionately than either of the girls were accustomed to seeing. That surprise warmed Katie beyond words.

  Even more surprising, was Patty’s casual insertion in the conversation over dessert, of the news that she and Derek had attended church that morning. That visit ended a long drought, which crossed Christmas and the previous Easter. She said no more about it, and neither Katie nor Gladys felt compelled to pursue details. Jesus, Gladys noted, was smiling at Patty especially, as if he were proud of her toddling attempt at finding peace.

  The most rousing surprise of all, however, came when they had all finished the mile high lemon meringue pie, and sat sipping either coffee or milk, depending on their demographic. Patty’s voice fell into a conspiratorial tone, when she introduced her news.

  “I just learned something from a friend, who knows someone that’s involved in music competitions for young people,” she said, winding up for a big reveal.

  A familiar note caught Gladys’s ear, but she wasn’t prepared for what came next.

  “She was telling about an event down in St. Louis last month, that leads to the national finals in Chicago, this month.” Patty leaned forward, her chest against the dining room table, as she built to the dramatic climax.

  Now Gladys knew something was coming, but didn’t dare to lay her hope on its arrival.

  “It turns out, one of the most impressive pianists in the competition, who qualified for the event in Chicago, is a fourteen-year-old named Bethany Marconi.”

  Marconi was the maiden name of Bill’s first wife. Bethany Marconi was Gladys’s granddaughter, and this competition was the same one that Jesus had mentioned to her. Gladys later thought how fortunate she was to have a stronger heart than Harry, because the shocks to her system had been tumbling over each other so fast she had little time to recover for the next.

  “Bethany is going to be in Chicago in two weeks, and it’s open to the public,” Patty said, in triumphal conclusion. She reached in her purse, and pulled out a piece of paper with a bar code on it, and the name of a ticket vendor prominently displayed. “I bought four tickets,” she said, pronouncing her punchline with dramatic fanfare.

  Gladys covered her mouth and shook her head. “I don’t believe this. This is what Jesus was telling me about. He told me I should go to see Bethany at this competition. But I hadn’t even had time to find out when it was or where exactly. I just don’t believe it.”

  Patty looked a bit deflated to find that Jesus had preempted her; but sorting through what her mother was saying seemed to lead to the conclusion that she and Jesus were on the same side, for once.

  When Gladys had last tried, over ten years ago, to find out how she could see Bethany, after the divorce, Bethany’s mother passed along the message, through Bill, that the rest of the family was not to try to see her. Bill’s visits being limited to the Oregon town in which they had lived at the point of the separation, Harry and Gladys hadn’t felt healthy enough to make that long trip to join him. Neither of them liked flying, and it was much too far to drive. Even the train would have been an ordeal for the frail couple, in those days after Harry’s second heart attack.

  Gladys didn’t know whether there was an actual legal restriction against her seeing Bethany. Patty didn’t care. She was willing to start a fight, if it meant giving Gladys a chance to see her absent granddaughter. Now she was proposing that Gladys take that risk, and Gladys had already agreed with Jesus’s suggestion of the same. Gladys briefly attempted to remember the bigger point he was making when they discussed Bethany last, but Patty tore her attention away from that blind search.

  “So, will you come down and go to the competition with us? I’ll get the details about when Bethany will be playing. We won’t have to be there for everything.”

  “I’ll be there,” Gladys said, with joyous determination in her voice, and a steady gaze of her pale eyes.

  Patty and Derek wanted to get Katie home before too late, hoping to beat any holiday traffic heading toward Chicago. This deflected Gladys from her anticipation of seeing Bethany, right into the pathos of having to say goodbye to Katie.

  When they hugged in the living room, Gladys detected an extra long cling from Katie, but there were no tears, just sparkling smiles. “We’ll see you in a couple o’ weeks,” Katie said.

  That prospect made Gladys smile too.

  With Patty saving her fire for the revelation of her grand plan to see Bethany, the visit lacked most of the friction expected across those generations. But Jesus seemed to want to stir things up anyway.

  “Tell her that I can heal her sleeping problems, if you just touch her head and speak to her mind.” Jesus whispered this in Gladys’s ear, in spite of the fact that no one else would have heard him if he had shouted at the top of his lungs. Gladys suspected the whisper was an effort to sweet-talk her into doing what he wanted.

  After only a short hesitation, Gladys offered the healing. “I’m hearing Jesus say that he can clear up your sleeping problems if you’ll let me pray for you.”

  Patty’s sunny veneer came off without so much as a ripping sound. “You know I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” she said, as if this were an answer.

  Gladys cleared that hurdle easily. “It doesn’t matter. Jesus can do it anyway,” she said.

  Derek spoke up. “It sure would be nice if you could sleep through the night, and not have to take those pills.”

  Patty bored holes in Derek’s forehead, with her laser eyes, but he had seen that before, and survived her best shot.

  “C’mon, Mom, at least let Grandma try,” Katie said, ignoring whether her input was welcomed in this exchange.

  “Okay,” Patty agreed, tersely. No one there thought she meant anything more than “let’s get this over with.” Her lowered brow and bulldog tone made that clear.

  Gladys wasted no time, and Jesus stepped in perfect unison with her. But, when she put her fingers on Patty’s forehead, her daughter shook it off.

  Derek and Katie continued their coalition of persuasion, urging Patty to cooperate. Gladys and Jesus just stood with their hands raised, waiting for her to decide. Taking a deep breath, Patty shrugged slightly and stood still this time, as those two hands overlapped just above her eyes. Gladys had to ignore the appearance that Jesus’s hand was fused into hers again, not needing any distractions to slow her down.

  “In Jesus’s name, I tell sleeplessness to go away, and I bless Patty to easily sleep through the night from now on,” she said, with barely a pause.

  Jesus knew this cascade of words was the performance of a prodigy. Everyone else assumed Gladys did this kind of thing all the time.

  Patty took a deep breath and seemed to soften. “Well, thanks for trying. We’ll see tonight if it helped.”

  Gladys was hoping for more assurance than that, so she looked at Jesus, who nodded once, as if to say “that’s all we can expect.” This released Gladys from the feeling that she should try something more, or perhaps try again. Jesus knew their audience even better than Gladys, so she settled for his nonverbal affirmation.

  More hugs and kisses followed, until the family was finally on their way out the door. Katie said the last word from the sidewalk, on the way to the car. “Have fun with Jesus,” she
said merrily.

  That evening, after finishing cleaning up, Gladys sat down on her couch, fully intending to watch TV, in order to avoid wallowing in missing her departed companion. Jesus sat close on the couch and put his arm up behind her, turned so he was facing Gladys. She tried briefly to ignore him, concentrating on the new remote control to her flat screen TV. But she couldn’t resist his eyes, and finally turned to take a picture of the look on that face. What she saw broke her resistance.

  “I want you to do something for me,” Jesus said. His breath smelled slightly of lemon meringue pie, even though he hadn’t eaten with the guests. Gladys assumed he had snuck a bit during the cleanup. That’s the sort of thing Harry would have done.

  “What’s that?” Gladys’s eyes drifted down to Jesus’s chest. He had changed back into his regular Sunday school Jesus attire.

  “I want you to close your eyes and picture me.”

  “But you’re sitting right here,” she said, renewing eye contact. “Why would I do that?”

  “Humor me, Gladdy. Please.”

  She gave a half shrug and complied. A purging sigh followed. “Yes, I can still picture you.”

  “Good. Because I want you to do this every day, after you can no longer see or hear me like you can right now.”

  Gladys opened her eyes. Some small voice inside her warned that he was getting ready to leave.

  Jesus answered that little voice. “I will never leave you. My spirit is the deepest, truest part of me. And I have put that spirit inside of you. That’s as real as you and I sitting here on the couch together.”

  Gladys put her hand on Jesus’s hand, where it rested on his near leg. “It won’t be the same,” she said. But her words carried no whine, just a slight sadness at the approach of the inevitable.

  He settled her fears a bit more. “I’m not going to do it tonight. I’ll stay visible until tomorrow after breakfast.”

  “Just can’t get enough of my toast,” she said, a girlish grin coming from somewhere in a past that she had not consciously shared with him.

  “I was hoping for French toast tomorrow, for my farewell.”

  “With bacon?” She said, teasing the Jewish carpenter. And they laughed together.

  Then they did watch TV, just like a regular Sunday night. And Gladys went to bed at the usual time, having discarded an idea about staying up late to talk with Jesus. He had offered an alternative.

  “I’ll sit by your bed, and you can open your eyes and see me any time you want.”

  Where that would have been a creepy prospect two weeks ago, it sounded like a good arrangement to Gladys. Weariness from the multiple excitements of the day had reduced her options and her resistance.

  When she was ready for bed, and under the covers, Jesus came in the room. They hadn’t arranged it this way, but he knew this was the way it had to be between him in bodily form and his dear friend Gladys. Later, she would have to give much deeper thought to the notion that Jesus actually stays with her at every moment of her day, no matter how mundane or how intimate. That was not for this night, however. And she fell asleep looking at him, seated in the dark, a golden glow from the hallway nightlight illuminating the fine curves his face and beard. The flickering light in his eyes stayed with her even as she slept.

  Gladys assumed Jesus wasn’t kidding about the French toast. She woke the next morning with energy to cook. Her first energy had always gone in that direction. Now she would share that part of herself once again with Jesus.

  As he stood next to her, leaning on the kitchen counter, Gladys asked a question.

  “What would you have done if I didn’t insist that you eat with me when we’re alone?” She was using a whisk to finish the eggy batter for coating the toast.

  “I knew you would insist,” he said.

  “But, if I hadn’t, you would have just stood by watching me eat?”

  “That’s what I usually do.”

  “You stand by watching me eat when I can’t see you like this?”

  “Sure. This experience with you is not as different for me as it is for you. I daily share in as much of your life as you’ll let me. I get to know you from the inside out.”

  “How does it look inside there?” Gladys said, not really calculating what this question meant or what a good answer would be.

  “Your soul is more distinct than your physical body,” he said. He helped her set the table and continued. “So it’s just like you inside there.” He smiled to color that heart-born answer, words not intended to satisfy a philosophy professor. He knew his audience. It was just Gladys.

  Their conversation turned toward the food, along with some recollections of their time together, and from there to recollections from Gladys’s past. Jesus found light and peaceful paths for their conversation, nurturing Gladys toward ending their experience together. But that didn’t keep the melancholy from rising up and tightening her breathing, like an old dress, which no longer fits a fuller figure. They sat talking for longer than they had taken to eat their meal, and Jesus won the battle over whether he should eat the leftovers. He knew she would enjoy the reminder of their special time, when she warmed those sweet, crispy pieces in her frying pan the next day.

  After wash-up, which had become a shared routine for them, they moved back to the couch in the living room. From there they could see the bright sunny day through a slim opening in the curtains. Gladys decided she would take a walk later, when it got a little warmer.

  “That sounds great,” Jesus said.

  “I was thinking I would wait until after you go.”

  “But I’m not going anywhere.”

  Even as he said this, he slipped closer to her on the couch. Gladys just stared at him, with her eyes half shut. Then he moved closer, and closer still, closer than she had imagined he could be. In that moment, she realized that Jesus was departing her living room in favor of her soul.

  Though she didn’t remember closing her eyes, she could no longer see her living room, and the piece of sun slipping through the drapes. She did see a light. And she saw Jesus. But, this time, he wasn’t standing in her kitchen, or sitting by her bed. Now, he sat with her in a place that she had only seen in her dreams. It was a house, with immaculate wood floors, perfectly painted white woodwork, and elegant blue walls. There was no furniture, only a window seat with a dark green cushion on it. She sat there, leaning on Jesus, looking out the window, and she could feel his chest rise and fall with his breathing. In that place, she felt younger.

  Then, into that house, which existed only inside her soul, she saw someone else enter. He was loud and jubilant, and very glad to see her. It was Harry. He was also younger than when she had seen him last. He was healthy and happy.

  Jesus’s movement, from outside her body to inside her soul, seemed to draw her eyes inward, shutting the external world out for a while. As he made that transition, she felt as if it was beyond her control, as if she could only smile and watch, just as he had smiled at her, watching.

  She sat on the couch like that for nearly an hour. The miracle of it included the fact that she didn’t fall asleep, even after a big breakfast, and the stress of worrying about Jesus’s departure, a departure coming right after Katie’s.

  But there really was no departure, for Gladys and Jesus. He stayed with her, just as he had promised.

  Chapter 25

  KEYBOARDIST

  The two weeks after Katie left, were a time of transition for Gladys, still adjusting to her new physical strength and stamina. She also did some adjusting to the modern world around her, allowing Derek to buy her a laptop computer, to set it up for her, and then send it to her house. Her resistance to joining the social-networked world broke, when she heard from Patty that she had found Bethany online, and had made contact. That was enough to convince Gladys to enter the twenty-first century, ready or not.

  During her days alone, Gladys faithfully sat on the couch and pictured Jesus, allowing that picture to live and to talk to her. Th
e only shadow of regret around this new practice, was not that Jesus was no longer physically visible; it was that she had only discovered the Jesus inside her so late in her life. The Jesus inside her, by the way, discouraged building on any foundation of regret, and Gladys knew she had better things to do.

  Aside from the couch time with Jesus, the highlight of her weeks was her meeting with Sister Alison, whom she simply called “Alison,” by now. When you have a great story to tell, there’s nothing you need more than a good listener. On that score, Alison provided Gladys with all that she needed. From stories of the time when she was seeing and hearing Jesus, to glimpses into what he was continually showing her each day, Gladys repeatedly inspired tears in her spiritual director. Alison’s intense reactions—sniffling, laughing and beaming from her bright eyes—surprised Gladys. Wouldn’t a gentle spirit like Alison have had many more intimate experiences with Jesus by now? Gladys didn’t venture to ask that question yet.

  When she left their meeting the second Friday after Katie’s visit, Gladys headed south, toward Naperville, Illinois. She avoided the tollways, and stuck to the stop-and-start highways that ran from just over the border, down into the Western Suburbs of Chicago. Gladys tried to discipline herself to stay near the speed limit, an exercise that differed from the discipline needed by most people, in that she was looking at the speed limit from below, not from above. In the end, something more than two hours of uneventful driving brought her to Patty and Derek’s house, in a neighborhood of winding streets named after Native American nations.

  Gladys parked her Malibu on the double-wide driveway and Katie came running out. She was just home from school, but celebrated the arrival of her grandma more jubilantly than she had the end of a school week. As weekends go, this one would be busy for the little multi-generational family. Dinner and reacquainting on Friday night, would be followed by a day trip to Chicago the next day, to try to see Bethany. Then, on Sunday, Gladys would, for the first time, see Katie play soccer. The girls planned a lunch for two after that, at Katie’s favorite restaurant.