A Marriage Carol

by Chris Fabry

  “I missed you,” he said, picking me up and turning in the sunlight.

  “We had breakfast together this morning.” I laughed.

  “Exactly. It’s been too long.”

  I will not be dishonest. Something in my stomach turned as I watched. I couldn’t decipher whether this reaction was to the clinging love of two passion-struck college kids or the comparison of what has resulted from our attraction.

  When I turned back to the scene, a misty vapor swathed me and I walked through it, searching for our former life. I found us walking near a familiar lake on a moonless summer night. Resting on that bench in the middle of nowhere. We had pictures of this place on subsequent anniversaries with subsequent children in tow, though we hadn’t visited in the past five years. His words came back, a waterfall of a memory. Fumbling with a piece of paper to get it just right. My hands over my mouth, trembling at his heartfelt proposal.

  I wanted to scream, to yell “caution”—to stop the events about to unfold. The giving of the ring, down on one knee, tears of happiness, and another long embrace that melted into a kiss so passionate I turned away. When I looked again, we had moved from lake shadows to candlelight in the little church where we were married. The gown, the smooth skin, the trim figures underneath the dress and tux, and the voice of our pastor charging us to love until “death do us part.”

  Jacob had written his own vows. His deep, resonant voice cut through time and with emotion he said, “Your love has captured my heart. As long as it beats in my chest, I pledge to let nothing come between the love we will share in the years ahead. For it will take death’s cold embrace to separate us.”

  My eyes shut tight. We had loved until death. Unfortunately it was love that died.

  When I opened my eyes it was our first anniversary. Friends had given us a weekend stay at their mountain hideaway. A remote, snow-covered area where we had to park and hike the nearly mile-long driveway. There was nothing to keep us occupied but the stocked refrigerator, a few VHS movies, and each other. For some reason, having nothing to do didn’t bother me.

  We were still in love back then, content in finding pleasure in each other’s bodies, and in our exuberance I knocked something from the shelf above the bed. As if peering over some forbidden parapet, the two of us pulled ourselves to the headboard and, mouths agape, looked in horror at the antique snow globe in a puddle on the wooden floor.

  “How are we ever going to explain that?” I said.

  Jacob laughed. I giggled, thinking about how the conversation might go. Then we were in each other’s arms again, delighting and wading deeper into the waters of pleasure God had created for us.

  The next scene was the result of one of those marital forays into the unknown—the arrival of our oldest, Becca. My heart, not in part but the whole, leapt and beat furiously. I said some awful things to my husband during that delivery. He just smiled and held my hand as I struggled through those hours. I always thought I didn’t really mean those things. He forgave me without question.

  As I watched, the rush of memory aroused an unwelcome internal conflict. I didn’t want to be drawn to him, but I was, particularly when I saw his wonderment at tiny fingers and toes, heard the suckling sounds of my firstborn daughter at my breast, and drank in the wonder of a newborn.

  “She’s so … perfect,” Jacob said. He reached out a finger and she grasped it as she suckled.

  “She’s amazing,” I whispered.

  Two people united around a shared infant. We were together. He even changed diapers, much to my surprise. And never complained about my nesting and the shuffling of furniture, and the crib I returned three times and exchanged because it just wasn’t right for the room.

  “Children are a gift from God Himself,” Jay said. He was near me, watching the same scenes. My cheeks flushed as I turned to face him, and Justin ran past me, chased by a much older Becca. My husband, a little older and more harried than in his college days, trailed the kids, carrying David.

  “Can you see this?” I said to Jay, looking into the mist around me. Wondering how much of the anniversary scene he had witnessed.

  “Don’t focus on me. Stay in the moment. Drink it all in because it won’t be here long.”

  When I turned back to my family, my husband and I were sitting together on the couch, Christmas wrapping paper strewn about the house, Becca playing “panthers and cheetahs” with the boys, their little legs scurrying downstairs, yipping and yapping in an incomprehensible children’s game. A smile passed between us as we listened to their imaginations fly.

  “Where do you think we’ll be in ten years?” Jacob said.

  “Under a tree surrounded by wrapping paper.”

  He laughed. “No, where do you want to be?”

  “Someplace warm where we can listen to this,” I said, the noise of the panthers and cheetahs rising toward us.

  “I want to give you that and more,” he said, leaning over and giving a kiss. “I’ll clean up down here and watch them. Why don’t you make use of these. You deserve it.”

  He handed me the unwrapped bath oils he had helped the kids pick out. Lavender and rose, my favorite getaway fragrances.

  “No, I need to get lunch started,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Upstairs. Now. The wildebeests will survive.”

  “Panthers and cheetahs,” I corrected.

  “Go.”

  Had he really been that thoughtful?

  The warmth and noise quickly faded, and in a blink Becca was nearly grown. We were in the car heading to soccer practice.

  “Why do you and Dad fight so much?” she said.

  I stared out the windshield. “We don’t really fight; we just disagree about a lot of things.”

  “You fight,” she said. “And you don’t make up. It’s like a teakettle that’s always ready to boil anytime the heat’s turned up.”

  I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “That must feel bad to live with every day.”

  “Yeah.”

  It felt like the scene in Citizen Kane where the husband and wife are sitting at opposite ends of the dining room table, the years flitting by, and the distance growing between them. The more I poured into our home and family life, the more Jacob seemed to pour into his work. The resentment festered. There we were, snow falling outside, him staring at the Sports page, me staring at the Obituaries.

  “Dan Fogelberg died,” I said.

  Jacob didn’t even drop the paper and look at me. “What from? Accident?”

  “Prostate cancer.”

  “Shame. He wasn’t that old, was he?”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “Remember ‘Leader of the Band’?”

  I nodded, but he didn’t see me. He hid behind his paper—except I noticed he wasn’t reading the sports any longer. He was just staring off, out the window, hidden behind the football standings. I moved toward him through the mist, shocked that there was more going on in his head than scores and statistics.

  “We saw him once, didn’t we?” he said. “In Cincinnati?”

  I answered vacantly, telling him the name of the town and venue. He could have told me how much the tickets were, of course. But he kept staring, finally lowering the paper and looking my way. I was already gone. I had shut him out. Decided conversation wasn’t worth the time.

  He pulled the paper up and I heard a voice amplified through speakers. We were sitting in a large church with a few hundred couples, listening to a man talk about going deeper in our marriage. I sat beside him in rapt attention taking notes. He glanced my way, nervously twirling his wedding band. I gave a look at his empty conference notebook, then back to my own. I thought he was uninterested in our marriage, at making it work. But when I looked more closely, there was something written in the book. I strained to see it at the bottom of the page, but he closed it quickly.

  And then we were saying good-bye to the children earlier that afternoon. David held on tightly to me, and I choked back the tears
as I heard myself tell how soon we would be home. The door closed and the three children went to the window to watch us.

  “Where are they going?” David said.

  “Probably more Christmas shopping,” Justin said.

  “Yeah, probably more shopping,” Becca said, putting a hand on their shoulders. Her face was the last thing I saw as the mist engulfed the scene.

  Drifting, floating, swirling like vapor rising, the mist parted and I saw the empty pot over the fire. Jay pulled my hand back and rested the pot on the brick fireplace. I was too stunned to speak. To see your own life vaporize before you that way, to see your own children struggling with the choices made, even though they didn’t understand them, took my breath away.

  “It felt real. Like I was right there. Every bit of it.”

  “You have beautiful children,” Jay said.

  “You saw it too. How?”

  “I can only observe, but the one holding the handle controls the experience. Those were your memories. It was your life.”

  “But I didn’t experience some of it. I didn’t know what my children said. I didn’t know my husband had written anything down in that notebook.”

  He nodded. “The answers to the questions you now have will surface from the snow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The hope you have for your marriage will lead you forward. The snow will show you the truth. Your mind will guide you from one memory to the next. The questions you have now, the observations you made, and frankly, your openness, all combine to lead you to what you’re really seeking.”

  “But I told you, we’ve made up our minds. It’s over.”

  “Yes, but you also said you would give my hope for you a chance. The images spring from a desire for change.”

  I looked at the warm pot on the hearth and the two that awaited me. “I want to check the phone. Try to call the children.”

  “That’s fine,” Jay said.

  “I don’t think I can go any further,” I said as I reached the hall. “It’s too painful … too much emotion.”

  “I know. But part of you wants to know more. Part of you wants to hope.”

  STANZA 4:

  The Other Man

  The phone was stillborn. As lifeless as my soul. I put the handset on the cradle and thought of Jacob’s face as he fought the wheel coming around the curve, saw the oncoming headlights, and I closed my eyes again, awaiting impact. He was still out there somewhere. He wouldn’t have left me alone to freeze. Or would he?

  A bay window near the kitchen table looked out on the landscape. I imagined fragile couples sitting here over fresh cups of coffee and warm biscuits, repairing their marriages a meal at a time. I shone my flashlight through the window and gasped at the piling snow. Wet, thick flakes as big as my hand fell fast and straight. Tree limbs swayed and quivered under the weight.

  On the kitchen table sat a plastic Tupperware tub, the kind the kids used for popcorn at one of their “sleep-overs.” Jacob would pop the corn, Becca would melt butter, and Justin and David were ready with enough sea salt to raise blood pressures in two states. Laughing, giggling, they would hurry off to the family room to watch one of the latest from Pixar or an old horror movie Jacob loved to show them. Frankenstein or Dracula or the Wolfman.

  I took the bowl and opened the side door. Without thinking, I stepped onto the porch in my socks. There was a sitting area here, too, with several tables and chairs. I scooped the snow into the bowl from the tabletop and kept going until it was overflowing.

  Glancing up, I saw a light on in the window above me and the flutter of a curtain. Then, nothing but the stillness of the night and the falling snow.

  Jay was at the back door when I returned. “You forgot something,” he chuckled, looking at my feet. No scolding or chiding, just a friendly recognition of the truth. He took the bowl from me and sat it on the table. I handed him my wet socks, and he met me in the living room with a towel and another pair. The feeling returned to my feet and I was warm again and ready for another excursion.

  I took the second pot from the hearth and dumped the snow inside, making sure to drain every drop into the pan. I did not want to miss anything. I did not want to come out of the misty scenes too quickly.

  “If the first bowl plumbed my past and used my own experiences and mind, how can it know the truth of the present?”

  Jay’s face reflected the firelight, orange and intense. “The snow will only show you what is. It covers the truth and then reveals it.”

  “So you don’t know how it works either.”

  His eyes sparkled. “Just that it has never failed in all our years.”

  I took the pot and held it near the fire. “Your wife. What’s wrong with her? Why does she stay upstairs?”

  “Believe me, if she could come down, she would be right at your side. It’s just her stage of life.”

  I wanted to ask more questions, how long they’d been married, how long he had cared for her, how many people had gone through what I was doing, but the curiosity of the golden bowl beckoned and I thrust it onto the fire. I closed my eyes as the mist ascended and the power of the snow enveloped me.

  Music had taken me to the threshold of my past, but this time I heard a voice crackling through a tinny speaker. It gave an ominous weather forecast, a freak storm that had taken the region by surprise. Equally ominous traffic reports told of motorists stranded in cars and urged everyone to stay inside and not venture out.

  “Shhh!” Becca said. She was huddled in the living room with her brothers under a cover they had dragged from my bed.

  “Why don’t we just watch a movie,” David said.

  “There’s no electricity, dope,” Justin said. “That’s why we can’t turn on the lights.”

  “Then how can we hear the radio?”

  “It uses batteries, goofball.”

  “Quiet!” Becca said. She pulled the radio closer and turned up the volume.

  The newscaster gave a list of closed roads and many accidents. Her cell phone rang and she fumbled in her pocket and opened it. “Mom?”

  “No, it’s your aunt Susan. Becca, have you heard anything from your mom and dad?”

  “Not yet. And the electricity went off.”

  “I figured. We’ve been trying the home line for a while.”

  Becca got up from the couch and walked out of earshot of the boys who kicked at each other from opposite sides of the couch.

  “Aunt Susan,” Becca said softly. “I’m scared.”

  “Your dad’s a good driver. They’re probably stuck somewhere in a bad cell area and—”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I’m worried about them, but I’m scared something’s happening. There was a letter on Dad’s desk. From a lawyer. I opened it.”

  “Oh Becca. I’m so sorry. I’m sure they’ll work it out.”

  “No, it’s talking about a divorce and papers and their agreement. I don’t understand most of it but it looks like it’s a done deal. Do you know anything about this?”

  Silence on the other end. “Honey, I wish I could drive down there right now and be with you. I’m so sorry. We’ve been praying for your mom and dad, and I knew things were bad. I didn’t know they’d hired a lawyer.”

  Tears streamed down Becca’s face. “Why are they doing this?”

  A pause on the other end. “Honey, you have to pull together for your brothers. Let’s just get you through tonight and we’ll deal with all of this. Together. Do you understand?”

  Hearing my sister talk this way to my daughter gave me a chill. We had never been what I would call “close,” but I could tell Becca was comforted by her words. Susan was acting in my stead, providing the support and comfort I couldn’t.

  The boys were ratcheting up the noise, then David came running in with his blanket wrapped around him and bumped into the doorjamb and fell. Wails pierced the room.

  “Justin!” Becca yelled.

  “I didn’t do anything!”

&nb
sp; “I have to go, Aunt Susan.”

  “Call me if you hear anything.”

  “I will.”

  “And know that we’re praying for you.”