by Kirby Gann
“You did come,” he says, “good for you.” A blush rises in the woman’s pale cheeks; a tremor shakes her soft upper lip. “This is brave, Lyda. It feels impossible, I know.”
“I’m here. I almost wasn’t. Little girl here helped me out.”
“You’re here. You are here,” he says. He drapes his arms around both women to lead them in, barking welcome again to the crowd hovering about the seats; he darts to one side of the cafeteria to secure two chairs. Lyda declines coffee; another drop might send her through the walls, she says. Ponder fetches bottled water from the kitchen and adds to the stock sitting on the table by the lectern. His appearance there encourages the attendees to find their seats, and at this he brings the meeting to order.
“For anyone here for the first time, my name is Brother Gil Ponder, pastor of Christ World Emergent, and I am an addict. I have been sober nine years and four months and seventeen days, and for this I serve the Lord and the Holy Spirit joyfully and gladly. The way to serve is through hard work, the hard work each of you know by simply being here. Thanks for coming. I like to begin these meetings with a bit of verse for us to meditate upon, to set the tone of our gathering. For anyone who would like to stay after, we can discuss its implications until dawn if you want. I can make coffee all night.”
He waits a beat for the expected laughter and then quotes the evening’s meditation, a favorite he falls back on often: Proverbs 14.23. All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. Ponder allows himself a few minutes to expand the statement, sculpting a context—experience has taught him that people often need a springboard to start their own thoughts—and then he opens the lectern. He takes his seat, ready to listen to the story of anyone willing to speak. But tonight is Lyda’s night; her story is the one he truly wants to hear. He’s hoping for revelations, epiphanies—for some hint of solace to be made from what he has done. Perhaps even news, or clarification. The anticipation her confession stirs in him blurs the tales of the first two speakers, their stories familiar recountings of bad choices and woe which echo his own, which he has plumbed and pondered and recounted ad infinitum so many times it bores him—he struggles to recognize the person he used to be. Still, he listens.
After the second speaker finishes, a long pause fills the room with coughs, a sneeze, the crinkle and squeak of styrofoam cups. The group waits, politely. And then Lyda stands, her hand dragging from Shady’s with reluctance as she takes the first step toward the front of the audience, her eyes upon her small-stepping feet.
“I’m not sure what-all I’m allowed to say up here,” she begins, her voice soft as a girl’s. She points out she’s been to a few meetings now and listened to what she must guess is a hundred stories and she’s struck by how few details are on offer, the true ins-and-outs of what people’ve done, how they managed to justify what their addictions demanded of them. “The mama in me wants to hear the whole story, you know?” and with this she gets some appreciative murmur from her audience and this settles her, visibly, her eyes rising from the lectern for the first time. Ponder knows the hardness about her, the angular features and sharp lines that frame her uncharacteristically soft mouth—the signs of a person who has held a lifetime of hurt and anger—but in that instant of acknowledging the people listening he feels he caught a glimpse of a hidden softness within her (that’s the only word he can find, soft), her soft mouth seeming then like a portal to another Lyda, the deeper one, the armor shed and the kind, if lost, soul that is hers alone peeking out to the world through the plush softness of her mouth.
She straightens her spine, says: “I have been owned by pills and painkillers near all my adult life. Name a drug and I bet you I’ve swallowed handfuls at a time. And I’ve done a lot of terrible things. Pretty much all out of the love of dope.”
At this last line the armor is retrieved and the softness evaporates and Ponder despairs that they will hear nothing other than the boilerplate narrative of bottoming out. He knows the basic outline of Lyda’s version already, how she began her slow ascent from the bottom weeks ago when Shady Beck had invited him to meet at Lyda’s house and he did and he spoke to her about where her life choices had brought her, and at what cost. And he had counseled her that if she wanted to she could make a change, she could—she could count on his help, and on the help of the Holy Spirit, and on the help of all who strove to work within the Spirit. Something about the woman fascinates him, he can’t put his finger on it, exactly. She’s like his shadow, what his life may have been. Maybe it’s just that his life has become inextricably bound to hers, in ways he hopes she will never know. There’s extra meaning for him beneath what she feels comfortable to speak here; a meaning or coded message he hopes will give him a degree of respite, if not absolution.
“What’s strange about this terrible stuff I done is that when I look back, and I’ve been looking at it long and hard a while now, when I look back with my head clearer than it’s been for the last, oh, twenty-three years or so”—Lyda smiles at the few chuckles from the group—“I’m stuck thinking all these things were done out of the fire of true love. Does that make sense to you all? When you have true love, the real thing, you’ll do whatever you have to do to keep it, won’t you? You’ll lie for it, steal for it, kill for it if it means you and your true love can be safe together. Maybe you ladies out there especially can relate to what I’m trying to say.”
She doesn’t get the laughter this time, only a few closed eyes and solemn nods, melancholy smiles. The men around Ponder are frowning at their loose hands dangling between their knees. How many different ways are there to fuck up a life? Everyone here knows.
“But I’m not talking about the love you get from a man. I had plenty of that before I was even seventeen and had a little boy of my own to prove it! No, what I’m talking about is love like what angels must feel from God. I remember hearing as a little girl stories of how much suffering saints endured for the love they knew was true, the love God filled them up with. I never got how someone could feel so certain in that love and, I don’t know, so righteous in it that they took being burned alive or stuck with arrows or any of those ways they used to torture and kill saints with—that they’d accept that suffering rather than part from this love they felt with God.
“Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I thought about this every day. I chalked it up to being another one of life’s little mysteries. But this one time my husband broke my wrist in a fight we was having. He didn’t mean to. He felt bad enough about it to take me to the ER and we told them I fell down steps holding the baby. They set the bones and give me some pills, I don’t even know what. But my wrist, it didn’t heal right. Once I got out of my cast—sometimes, it could be any old thing, I’d turn my hand a certain way and it felt like bits of glass were tearing at the little muscles, setting down a cup of coffee felt like someone stabbed me sharp. You can guess the messes this brought on. Which made Bethel mad—Bethel was my husband—I’d spill coffee all over him and he was not a kind man and this meant, sometimes, another trip to the doctor. But the pain in my wrist was the worst part; that never left. We tried tylox and vicodin and by the time we got to demerol I’d come to understand the sort of love a saint must feel for God because I wasn’t feeling no pain anywhere anymore, my body, my heart in my body, was glowing like jewels in the sun. It wasn’t long before I knew I would do anything to keep hold of that kind of love.
“But I wasn’t no saint. I was more selfish than that—I didn’t care what happened to anyone else if it meant I could get my hands on my demerol or the oxy reds or greens, percodans in a pinch, you name it. It didn’t take long for me to figure there was the dose the doctor prescribed and then there was the dose that helped me the way I wanted help. When you get that first great wave, like you’ve been waiting all your life to find just this, I remember thinking, ‘lordy me I have been waiting for you so long and didn’t even know it and now here you are.’ I didn’t have to worry about a damn thing anymore, never
again. So long as I had me my pills.
“There was this man I won’t name here. I bet more than a bunch of you here knew him, too. This man had a big problem with my husband—everybody had a problem with Bethel, but this man had a special problem with my husband and his wife and he planned to put an end to that problem. And he came to me with this, he wanted me to know. I was humming high when he told me. I told him I didn’t care what Bethel did, but by this time there were two mouths to feed. My husband wasn’t good for much but he did keep a job. And this other man, he understood. He made promises. We sealed the deal, as they say, with a big bottle of pills he knew how to get, and with him swearing that Bethel’s son wouldn’t starve. My boys have different fathers but that’s another story.
“It sounded rosy to think about it. My bad husband was gone, and we weren’t ever close to rich but we got by. Most important to me was that I got to glow holy every day. I wasn’t much more than a girl myself and so long as this man kept his word we’d be safe. And he kept his word, in his way. What I learned was that in this part of the world you can cut a decent life for yourself if you know how to turn your face a certain direction and keep your mouth shut.”
She angles her face away from the audience as if to show what she means; and then she pauses, biting her bottom lip. Everyone here can relate to this turning of the face, closing the mouth, Ponder thinks; isn’t that the way for each of us, all the fallen who merely wake up one day to find ourselves in the world? Every soul in this room has traded on the opportunity to look aside, to gaze upon some dream while they tried not to notice their lives burning down around them. He’s grateful now to have the faith to approach his life full-on, to know what he is doing and why. It pleases him to help people in need, to see them uncurl from dried shells to full-flowering humanity. He could not do this with any meaningful scope without his ministry. Or, now that it’s in progress, this new building complex. He is willing to do anything required to grow his ministry further, and has proven this willingness over and over—a fact these meetings force him to reflect upon. How similar the impetus is to the addict enthralled by her addiction. Similar impulses, but with a crucial difference, the salient difference that saves him, saves them: the addict will do anything for herself, to feed her hunger; Ponder will do anything for a ministry whose mission is to save others.
Doesn’t that make even the most grave offense forgivable? At least potentially? How many sacrifices have been made throughout history to make such ministries possible? The list of the dead stretches back farther than the death of Christ Himself.
Lyda palms a tear as she speaks of times she came to realize her need for dope was greater than her will to do anything else. That the love it filled her with was not love for anyone else, but for herself. Which as a mother she knew was not the right way to love, but she was helpless within it. Sometimes she cut back; she managed to go cold turkey for days. “But then I wouldn’t recognize who I was,” she says. “My body didn’t feel like mine anymore, it was a mean friend who hurt me all the time. So I’d get out the medical manual this man give me to memorize the symptoms I needed to show. Later I got too lazy to do even that much, and got my oldest to cop for me. On my medicine I could be myself again, glimmering inside. I stopped thinking of the pills as drugs, they were more like vitamins, stuff my body needed. Drugs meant weed, blow, that stuff. Twenty-three years like that. I never thought one day I’d be alone without even my boys to talk to. But that’s where it led me. I’m the mother who doesn’t know where her boys are, or if I’ll see them again, or if they are even alive. That’s what my medicine cost me. My health? I’ve been lucky, my health isn’t bad. My life? I’m still here, though often I wish I wasn’t. But my boys—only you that’s mothers yourselves can understand what I lost. My boys are grown and left me and neither a one said so much as goodbye. Why should they? What have I ever been to them? In my head I was Mom, but all they got to see was a junkie they had to take care of. I thought dope filled me with true love, a mother’s love, God’s love, but that was a lie. Left me alone not feeling a thing for anybody. But knowing that and doing something about it are two totally different things. If it wasn’t for that little miss prettier-than-I-am over there, a good friend to my boys, I wouldn’t even be here.”
Her voice softens to a whisper.
“Not that I know for certain if my being here is even right to do. Here I am telling all you strangers my story and who knows why. Isn’t that just how the world is? We do things we’re ashamed of, and then we look somewhere else hoping we’ll be told it’s all right.”
Ponder stares at the brassy ponytail hanging over her seat-back as Shady tilts up her head. He has always thought so highly of her—a bright kid with a good head on her shoulders, helpful to a fault, an example to younger girls; the confusions for which she sought his counsel were standard for anybody her age. Except for the singular phone call she made five weeks ago. He would like to see how she turns out, confident it will be something good. He’s obligated to her as well: it was this doctor’s daughter who gave him the opportunity to regain full rein of his ministry, though she’ll never know that. Isn’t it strange and true that empty saying of how the Lord works in mysterious ways. Ways more mysterious than a man simple as himself could imagine on his own. He wonders if God has written out every story already and then sits back and watches his creation unfold, and this is what we call Fate. Or does He make it up as he goes along, dropping hints and guesses to those willing to listen, curious to see what they will do.
Shady had been the one to contact him; it was nearly four in the morning and he hardly recognized her, hearing the nervousness in her voice as it underscored each apology; he had to tell her several times that she had done the best thing for her friend in calling him and of course he would help.
“He needs a safe place to stay until we get a few things together,” she had said. “He doesn’t want to steal your van.”
“That’s honest. I appreciate acts of honesty. What kind of trouble are we talking about? He’s running from,—he’s what? What am I supposed to do for this young man?”
Ponder apprehended before she asked that the idea was for him to harbor the young man in his home. She was vague on the details and at first—before he realized the ramifications went beyond the boy, beyond Shady, and conceivably could immerse Ponder himself and the CWE ministry—he advised she go to the police. Then he apprehended it would be best for no one else to know. For the sake of propriety and uncomfortable speculation. He tried to position his sense of obligation away from legal and moral concerns, and to set it under the purview of his calling: shelter to those in need is a fundamental responsibility he believes in, not only as a pastor but as a man. He stopped with the questions and took the reins, instructing her on how best to get the church van into the parking garage beneath his condo high-rise. Then he got on the phone with Carolyn to see what in the schedule could be put off to another day.
An emergency counsel session, he explained, trying not to resent her request for explanation.
And when the boy showed up and Ponder recognized him, his nerves briefly shattered.
He tried to look past the fact, but the unavoidable truth was that he had not expected to know this boy, yet when the boy arrived, Ponder did. He did not want to know him. His name and his family was a cup he would have preferred to have pass from his lips. For Ponder to pull off the plan he was barely aware of even strategizing yet he would have preferred an absolute stranger, not the young face with the floating eye, the lank rusty hair tousled from sleep or from being wind-blasted over an all-night drive, the limp to his gait that looked like he had a crutch in place of one leg. Nothing more substantial about him than a garden rake. Ponder remembered him from that surreal and gloomy night at Greuel’s house, and in a sudden inner dawning he understood what the boy had done and why he needed help. He was a runner for Arley Noe. Here was the thief of his church vans, and now he was a thief to Arley Noe.
Sometimes yo
u have to be ready to recognize the moment God cracks open a locked door and leaves it for you to decide whether to walk through.
Ponder welcomed his guest somberly. You look like you could use a rest, he said, and the boy said yes, he was tired, but what he wanted more than anything else was a cold glass of water and a hot shower. Ponder told him to get himself a bottle out of the refrigerator and went in search of clean towels. Once he had readied the bathroom he came out to find the boy standing in the center of the main room, circling in place as he took in the condo’s spacious design: two levels, the bedrooms upstairs along a balcony that overlooks the main floor, the exterior wall composed of high vaulting windows that give over the wooded land cut by roadways and punctuated by water towers, steel globes at that moment rising above the morning mist and glistening in the sharp light—a wonder-view of Pirtle County.
“What is it?”
“This place. I guess I imagined a preacher living somewhere different.”
“It’s not mine. I just live here. Even preachers have to live somewhere.”
“I always wondered what these condos looked like. My brother worked this job when it got started.”
“Oh yeah? Your brother’s a builder?”
The boy didn’t answer. He pressed his forehead against the window as he tested how far in either direction he could see. When he stepped back again he stretched his sleeve over one hand to wipe at the oil on the glass where his forehead had been. He had emptied the water bottle already and looked for where to put it. Ponder took the bottle from him, asked if he wanted another.