The Christmas Blessing

by VanLiere, Donna

  “And if I hadn’t been a mechanic, I never would have met your mother, so I guess there’s a reason for everything.” He wrung out the dishcloth before wiping down the counters. “Do you want to be a mechanic?” he asked, smiling. I shook my head.

  “I’m not so sure what I want to be anymore,” I said. I waited for the lecture. I waited for the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me speech, followed by arms thrown in the air. But it never came. If he was displeased, or worse yet, disappointed, Dad never showed it. He kept any advice or words of frustration to himself.

  “Everybody’s meant to do something,” he said, assuring me. “You’ll know what you’re supposed to do; a moment will come, and you’ll know.”

  “I think that moment has come,” I said, dreading what I was about to tell him. Dad turned off the lights in the kitchen and sat in his recliner. I sat on the sofa next to Rachel, hoping I’d gain some level of support from her. “I need to get going,” I started.

  My grandmother jumped up and headed for the kitchen. “I’ve got Tupperware full of food from this week.” She exited through the dining room and brought back four Tupperware containers, stacking them on my lap. “This way I know you’re eating something good.”

  “Um,” I said. Any conversation that begins with “um” is always off to a roaring start. I cleared my throat and started again. “Um, one of the residents talked to me yesterday.” All three of them looked at me; they could tell by my tone that what I was relaying wasn’t good news. “He suggested it might be a good idea for me to shelve medical school—to take a break for a while.”

  “What sort of crazy is he?” my grandmother snapped.

  “He’s not crazy. He’s the resident for my current rotation.”

  “Why did he say that?” my father asked. I shuffled on the sofa; the Tupperware began to topple at the movement.

  “Because something’s not clicking with me, Dad. I don’t know what it is.” The room was quiet, with the exception of the television news playing in the background. My grandmother looked at my father, who, much to my discomfort, had never taken his eyes off me.

  “But you still want to pursue medicine, right,” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.” I sat holding the Tupperware, hoping I didn’t sound as dumb as I looked.

  “You need to tell that horrible doctor that he’s making you think awful thoughts about yourself and making you all crazy in the head,” my grandmother said. She nodded toward my father, as if he was supposed to take over from there.

  “He said he thought I’d make a good physician, Gramma.”

  “So what’s the problem?” My grandmother was beside herself and threw her hands in the air. “People go through life wondering what they’re supposed to do when it’s always right in front of them. They should do what they’re good at.”

  “But I’m not good at this.”

  “Nonsense! You’re good at it all,” my grandmother said, throwing her hands up in the air again.

  “So this doctor is suggesting that you get out of medicine and do what?” my father asked.

  “I could do anything: research, work in a hospital lab, maybe some sort of administrative position.” My father nodded but didn’t say anything.

  My grandmother slapped the armrests and rocked back and forth in her recliner. Dad wasn’t handling this the way she wanted. “You were meant to be a doctor,” she said. “From the time you were a boy you were meant for this.” They didn’t say it, but I knew my family was disappointed—I’d gotten this far only to drop out. We all stared at the floor, wondering what to say.

  “This is what I think,” my father finally said. “I think you need to fulfill your duties through the holidays. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up it seems much of the staff would be on vacation, and they would appreciate any help they can get around the hospital. Hopefully, during that time, you’ll be able to think and figure out what you want to do.” I’d have till December 23 to figure things out, that’s when the rotation ended and med students went on Christmas break.

  On the drive home I felt relieved. At least everything was out in the open, and my father was right; I needed to finish the rotation. It was the right thing to do. But looking back, I know that if I had walked away at that time, if I had made the decision to move on to something else, that my life wouldn’t have been shaken up and turned upside down and inside out. Like Dad said, there’s a reason for everything.

  FIVE

  We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

  —C. S. Lewis

  Meghan was up and out of bed before anyone else. She ran to the park and hovered around the massive oak tree, waiting. She should be along soon, Meghan thought. Here she comes. Meghan pretended to check her laces as the woman in the neon cap pushed a button on her stopwatch and took off. Meghan bolted upright and ran after her. The young woman’s legs were longer than Meghan’s, and her strides were fluid and graceful. But Meghan pushed hard, her pace gradually quickening.

  The woman slowed to a jog and began walking up the hill on her way out of the park. Meghan shook out her arms and legs and walked along the lake before she finally fell to the ground, and rolled around in the grass, laughing. I did it. I finally did it.

  • • •

  Charlie snapped the television off when Meghan walked into the room dressed like a burly football player. It was the Halloween party at the hospital, and she was going to push Charlie in the parade of costumes. Charlie got down to business right away. “Did you run this morning?” Meghan nodded. “Was she there?” Meghan nodded again. “Did you beat her?” Meghan lowered her head. “Oh come on,” Charlie said, disappointed. “You gotta beat her someday.”

  Meghan raised her head and smiled. “I did.”

  Charlie let out a whoop and pumped his arm in the air, as though Meghan had just scored a winning run. “I knew it’d happen someday. Next stop: the Olympics.”

  “How about, next stop: Halloween Party? Come on; get your costume on. Besides, I can’t train for the Olympics while you’re in this hospital bed. If you’re going to coach me, you’ve got to be out in the field with me.”

  “I’m getting out of here just as fast as I can,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

  “Stop doing that,” she said, leaving Leslie to help him with his costume. “Or you’re going to have ape hands like all those wrestling freaks.”

  Meghan’s family arrived early to help with the party; Luke was dressed like a fireman, and Olivia ran around the unit wearing red tights and leotard and a black hat with a piece of white rope bobbing from the top. Meghan found a wheelchair and pushed it back to Charlie’s room, where she found him dressed as Charlie Chaplin, waiting for her. Leslie stood nearby, smiling, proud of her creation.

  Leslie helped Charlie into the wheelchair, and Meghan pushed him to the pediatric unit, through the parade of costumes that filled the hallway. The staff clapped and cheered as the children, dressed like Disney characters, horror monsters, and superheroes, filed by. Med students had been volunteered to man the empty patient rooms as the children went from door to door yelling, “Trick or treat.”

  I was standing behind a door when I heard a loud knock. I opened it to find a small boy dressed as a fireman and a little girl with a rope sticking out of her hat. I tried to make out her costume.

  “What are you today?”

  “A firecracker,” she said, beaming. Her mother sighed and nodded.

  “I always thought firecrackers were loud and annoying, but now I know different because you’re quiet and very pretty.” She opened her mouth, embarrassed, and hugged her mother’s waist. “What’s your name?”

  “Olivia.” I put candy in her bag.

  “Olivia sounds like the name of a princess. Are you a princess?”

  Olivia shook her head and buried her face in her mother’s side. Her mother thanked me for the candy and pulled her daughter toward the next room. Olivia peeked up at me, smiling. “Hey, what’s your name?” she yelled from down
the hall.

  “Nathan.”

  “ ’Bye, Nathan,” she said, reeling from her first crush.

  How could I have known then that that little girl would remember my name? That simple act would confirm again that sometimes God uses the smallest of messengers to help get our attention.

  The next morning I pulled a hooded sweatshirt over my head and slipped on a pair of sweatpants. I called William and asked if he wanted to go for a run. He didn’t. William hated to run. I persisted, and he walked into my apartment wearing a pair of orange shorts over his sweatpants. I looked at him, wondering if it was a joke or not.

  “What?” he asked. “Don’t runners always wear shorts over their jogging pants?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He looked down at himself. “I swear I saw this in a magazine on some big-name runner. Name some big-name runners, and I’ll tell you if it was that guy or not.”

  I laughed and grabbed my keys. “No big-name runner would wear an outfit that looked like that.”

  William checked himself out before following me out the door. “Am I still like Shaft,” he yelled down at me on the stairs.

  “Even Shaft couldn’t be cool in that outfit,” I said, sliding behind the wheel of the truck.

  We drove to the park and started our run. “Hold on, man,” William said, pulling me back. “Don’t go so fast. What’s the point of running, anyway?” I looked at him and shook my head. He crouched to the ground and untied his shoe. “I need to fix my shoe. You go ahead and I’ll catch up.” I left him there, knowing William’s run was over for the day.

  I ran a few laps around the lake. I pushed myself hard until the sweat rolled down my back. Running had always been a good stress reliever for me, although recently it seemed as if nothing was relieving the stress anymore. I ran faster, wondering why I couldn’t be more like my father. I’d been asking myself the same question ever since I was a child.

  I remember writing a letter to my mom. I must have been about ten at the time:

  Dear Mom,

  When I grow up I hope I can be like Dad and even work in the garage with him. Sometimes he lets me play with the jacks and the lifts and I’m really good with them.

  I love you,

  Nathan

  I laughed at the thought. Working in a garage would have been so much easier than going into medicine. People always said that I was like my father because I was quiet, but Dad’s qualities ran much deeper than his silence.

  Many times, I’d awaken in the night and see light coming from the living room. I’d creep there and find my father sitting alone, flipping through the family album, looking at pictures of my mother. From time to time, he would lean his head back against the sofa, his eyes closed. Watching him, I always imagined that he was entering a secret passageway, one that brought the moments captured in those pictures to life—those times with Mom that were so sweet, yet so painful to think about. Sometimes, I would tiptoe into the room and sit next to him on the sofa, but usually I would just go back to my bed without letting him know I was there. Somehow, even as a small boy, I recognized that those moments were sacred for him, special times he had carved out to be alone with my mother.

  “God didn’t take your mother,” he’d always tell me, echoing what Mom had told me weeks before her death. “He received her. There’s a difference.” He had promised my mother that he would explain that to me until I finally understood.

  One Saturday, Dad was working on Lorraine’s car in our driveway when she made a comment about how God had taken my mother to Heaven. “He didn’t take her,” I said, protesting. “He received her.” My father slid out from underneath the car and looked at me. On that day, he realized that I understood. And he was right. I knew that God wasn’t striking people with disease; I knew He was loving. My mother had shown me that love before she died. And after her death, though my father wasn’t as comfortable with words as she had been, he gave that love hands and feet and wings every day; but I never understood why she had to die.

  “God loved your mother very much,” he’d tell me, trying to comfort me after I’d awoken from a nightmare and gone into his room. As a boy, I had a recurring dream that he’d died, too. “He loved her so much that he stopped the pain she was in,” my father explained. He’d lift the covers on his bed and let me crawl in next to him. “Go back to sleep,” he’d say, kissing my head. I’d try, but often I’d lie awake, thinking about my mother: If God knew she was going to be sick, why didn’t He make her better? Why pray at all if people are just going to die anyway? Why do so many good people have to die? And as many times as I’d ask those questions, I never found any answers. All I knew was that I would never be as strong as my father.

  William stepped onto the path and broke my concentration. “Unless somebody’s chasing you, there’s no reason to run that fast,” he said, stretching.

  “Are you ready to break a sweat?” I asked.

  “As long as it doesn’t drip down into my shoes.”

  A female runner slowed down to pass us, turning back to look at me. She stopped and walked up to us. “Is this official doctor stuff?” she said. I looked at her, and she smiled the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen. “We met a few days ago when you were walking in the clearly designated running side of the hallway.” I remembered who she was; I just wasn’t used to women coming up and starting a conversation with me. William picked up his legs and ran in place.

  “I gotta keep moving,” he said. “I’m losing my stride.” He leaned toward me, and whispered, “Keep it together this time.” William knew I was notorious for blowing it with women. It wasn’t in my genes to be suave and cool. I watched him run off and nearly laughed. For somebody who was so agile on the basketball court, William was a lousy runner. I walked with my new friend around the lake.

  “I’m Meghan Sullivan, by the way,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Nathan,” I said.

  Megan noticed William, who was no longer running but talking with two women on the other side of the lake. He met women everywhere he went, and they always loved him. “I think your friend has lost his stride,” she said, watching William.

  “No, I think he’s definitely found it.” She laughed, and I noticed how pretty she was, even early in the morning, without makeup. I put my hands in my pockets and thought about her name; it was so familiar. “Are you the Sullivan who’s organizing the scholarship run at the hospital?” She turned toward me and her eyes lit up.

  “Did you hear about it?”

  “I signed up as a sponsor.” I looked at her, remembering something. “Denise said you’re one of the fastest runners in the state.” She was embarrassed and didn’t say anything. “She also said you were one of the heart patients.”

  “I like to think of myself as a close, personal friend of Dr. Goetz, not as a heart patient.”

  I smiled, wondering why anyone would want to be friends with Dr. Goetz. “Why are you such close friends with him?” I said, playing along.

  “A ventricular septal defect that never closed.” Hole in the heart. I looked at her, and she read my mind. “I don’t know why I can run. Ever since I was a little girl, doctors said I’d live a normal life, but I’d just never be able to overexert myself.”

  “Doesn’t running qualify as ‘overexerting’ yourself?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yes. Dr. Goetz said running would be out of the question.”

  “How about a dart? Would they have let you dart somewhere?” She grinned and suppressed a laugh.

  “If it was a slow dart.”

  “Same with a dash?”

  “A slow dash would be fine, but I could never make a mad dash anywhere.” I laughed out loud, and Meghan joined me. She was attractive, athletic, and funny.

  “Have you ever been concerned when you run?” I asked. She shook her head.

  “My mind knows there’s something wrong with my heart—I’ve seen the X rays; I know it’s defective. But when I run, it’s like
my heart doesn’t know it. It’s as if I was created to do it. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, unsure whether I believed that or not, because I couldn’t imagine what I was created to do.

  “If something happened, it’d just be part of the race. Like your job. You have great days when people are healed, but there are days when they’re not, where nothing you do will make them better. You take the bad with the good but in the end, the good will always outweigh the bad.” Again, I wasn’t sure if I believed that or not. “What kind of doctor are you?” she asked.

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m a third-year med student.”

  “Are you studying to be a cardiologist?” I told her I wasn’t. “Why not? The heart’s where all the action is. Without the heart nothing happens.”

  “That’s exactly what they teach us in med school. They say, ‘without the heart, everything goes splat.’” I made a nice wet sound for dramatic effect, and she laughed. I was on a roll.

  “So what’s it like being a med student?”

  “Oh, it’s as many cups of weak coffee you can stomach a day and so much more.”

  “So what you’re saying is that with the urine samples, catheters, bedpans, and weak coffee . . . it’s all glamour, right?”

  “And all of it could be yours if you want to go to school for the rest of your life.” Meghan was easy to talk to; for once I wasn’t stumbling over my tongue. “What year are you?” I assumed she must be in her fourth year of college.

  “I’m a freshman.” I snapped my head and looked at her. I couldn’t believe it. She seemed so much older than the other freshmen I knew from the university.