Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  I’d tiptoed downstairs and gone out through the garage—a safe distance from Mom and Dad’s room.

  “What the heck, Aidan? You cracked my window!”

  He was shivering, hands shoved into his pockets, his T-shirt wet with sweat and steaming on the frigid November night. His eyes were a bit wild.

  “Are you drunk?” I demanded. I’d told him the last time he’d turned up like this that I wanted nothing to do with him if he was inebriated or stoned.

  “Maybe,” he slurred.

  I took in his thin T-shirt and jeans, then noticed his bare feet. “Aidan, really? No shoes?” I was about to launch into the sermon I reserved for Aidan’s top three misbehaviors—cheating, speeding, and getting drunk—when I looked into his face, finger already brandished, and was halted by his expression. I paused, my arguments deflating, then took his arm and pulled him into the garage. I couldn’t take him into the house without risking a parental firestorm, so I turned on the space heater my dad used for tinkering at his workbench and installed Aidan in the passenger seat of the family Chevy. I rolled down the window to let some heat in, then reached for the blanket my dad always kept in the backseat.

  “I don’t need that,” Aidan said, swatting at my hands as I tucked the fabric around him.

  “Yes, you do,” I said calmly, trying to read the expression on his face.

  He stopped resisting and I finished the job, then cranked up the heat a little more and went around the car to crawl into the driver’s seat.

  Aidan’s eyes were closed and the shivers now came in bursts. I lay my head against the backrest and watched as they slowed, then ceased. After long minutes had passed, during which I suspected Aidan might have dozed off a time or two, he finally opened his eyes and stared straight ahead. I was still sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, my legs pulled up.

  “You know,” I said into the dark silence, “it would be really great if you could start having your crises during daylight hours.”

  He smirked a little reluctantly. A few more minutes lumbered by. I’d figured out early in this contorted thing we called a friendship that I didn’t need to pry information from Aidan. If he came to me, he was planning on speaking. Eventually. I just had to find the patience to wait for him to be ready. He’d done for my self-control what no number of groundings and lectures had before.

  I was dozing off myself when he spoke. “My parents are splitting up.”

  I thought I must have heard him wrong. If someone had asked me to list three things I was sure of, I’d have said God’s existence, my dad’s beloved Cubs losing, and Aidan’s parents never divorcing. Russ and Janet Dennison were pillars of our rural community, active in our small-town government and in the Baptist church, avid volunteers for important causes, and despite the fact that their son might have spent more time in detention than he actually did in class, well respected and envied for the strength of their bond.

  “What do you mean, ‘splitting up’?”

  “I mean,” Aidan said, anger and consternation washing over his face, “they’re … splitting up.” He looked at me as if he expected me to explain it to him.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice rose and I motioned for him to keep it down.

  The next few minutes were a halting account of what had transpired that evening. He’d come home past his curfew, fully expecting to be grounded again, and had found his parents locked in conflict—his mother in tears and his dad bristling with anger. They’d sent him upstairs and ordered him to stay in his room, but he’d crept back to the top of the stairs to listen.

  He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and turned his head farther away from me. “Dad said something about getting a divorce,” he said in a broken voice. “And Mom told him he’d have to tell me himself, because she’d have no part in breaking the family up.”

  I squeezed his arm and tried to think past the confusion in my mind. “Aidan, people have arguments all the time. Maybe this’ll blow over. You know how it goes—parents get angry, they say stupid stuff, and then they figure things out.”

  He turned and looked at my hand where it gripped his arm. “My dad went up to the attic and came down with a suitcase,” he said. Tears choked off his voice, his emotions heightened by the alcohol in his system.

  “Aidan …”

  “And I …” He swallowed hard again. “And I lost it.”

  I’d seen him lose control before, so I had a vague idea of what it looked like.

  “What did you say?” He shook his head. “Aidan.”

  “I told him to go to hell.” His eyes were haunted as they connected with mine. “I said I hated them both and that I was moving out anyway. Dad yelled, ‘Go to your room right now, young man!’—something like that—and I flipped him off and ran down the stairs and out the door.” Something that looked like absolute brokenness washed over his face. He fisted his hands and tried to control the emotions quaking through his body. “I didn’t know where to go,” he said, the words strangled and rushed. He gripped my hand where it lay on his arm. “I just—I didn’t know where to go.”

  I’d never seen him so weakened by emotion. I didn’t know what to do. How to comfort him.

  The car’s console separated us, but I tried to bridge the gap. I laid a hand on his face so he’d know I wasn’t embarrassed by his tears. I stroked his arm and tried to speak soothing words about “maybe” and “tomorrow” and “we don’t know.” He dismissed my hopefulness with a shake of his head and tried to push away my hands when emotions welled up in his eyes again. But I couldn’t back down. I couldn’t leave him alone with so much pain and fear.

  I leaned in close so he couldn’t look away and poured all the confidence and calm I could muster into my gaze. “You’re going to get through this, Aidan.” He tried to avoid connection, but I cradled his cheek in my hand and brought his eyes back to me. “We’ll figure this out,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure who first kissed who. There was surprise, wide-eyed hesitation, then an unspoken mutual surrender to the solace of insentience.

  What followed was a fumbling flight from a reality we were too young to grasp, warm breaths and reaching hands. Looking back the next day and for many days after that, I was grateful for the tight confines of my dad’s prized sedan. Cup holders and gearshifts had kept a full expression of our shared grief from tarnishing a friendship that was—we realized at that moment—more primal and pure than we could possibly articulate. It was the wordlessness of that night that had ultimately defined and deepened what drew us.

  And then, by common, unspoken consent, we’d drifted back from the brink to a more practical intimacy. The kind that soared in art and words, but left our teenage spirits free to make the mistakes hardwired into our needs. I tried to erase the memory of our lapse in judgment and berated myself when I failed. But as his parents’ passions cooled and wiser minds prevailed, we saw their reconciliation as a fresh, new milestone in our own relationship, one in which bygones could be safely forgotten and a less murky foundation laid.

  But the murkiness had not been entirely abolished. It had merely lain dormant for twenty-some years. I was discovering again that love, like grief, doesn’t die. It bleeds until it can no more. Then, pale and listless, sleeps.

  eight

  It took us three more months to decide to pursue Nepal in earnest, after breaking the idea to Ryan by the lake. Three months of praying together, then inviting our friends and family into the prayer circle. Three months of conversations that crescendoed into arguments and decrescendoed into a tenuous truce only relieved by the promise of more talks.

  They usually started with Sam asking the obvious. “Are you still struggling with it?” We’d be driving home from church. Or pulling our trash cans up the driveway. Or wrapped up in each other as our bodies cooled.

  “Yes,” I’d answer, hoping the single word would be enough.

  “Can you tell me why?” Or something to that effect. I
think he sincerely wanted in on my thought process, but my own mind demanded a response from me so often during the day that the added pressure of Sam’s question felt like badgering.

  We’d read books and interpreted them completely differently. We’d spent time in independent prayer and come together afterward to find our “signals” didn’t match. We’d asked our friends and family for their input and gotten no consistent answers. Just exhortations to be careful, to take our time, to think it through.

  And when three months had passed without a consensus, Sam had done exactly what I’d granted him permission to do when I spoke my wedding vows. “I love you, Lauren,” he’d said, his voice resonating with a clarity I hadn’t heard in a while. “There is no doubt—no doubt—in my mind that this urge to do ministry in Nepal is from God. I know you have reservations. I understand and respect them. And all I can ask is for you to trust me on this. To trust me and to trust God, because this call feels like a fire in my gut … Honey, if it’s from him, how can we second-guess it?”

  I sat in the wingback chair in the living room, hands folded in my lap, ankles crossed, and watched the energy of conviction endow his movements and voice with authority and certainty. And while I tried to school my features into a thoughtful expression, my mind reeled with the emotions I’d been battling since he’d dropped that sheaf of pamphlets on the dining room table months ago, fissuring the foundation of our lives. I thought about the financial hurdles, the administrative nightmare, the relational upheaval and logistical insanity of pioneering a ministry, securing our finances, leaving our home, and setting up life in a Third World country we only knew from books and documentaries.

  And I thought about Ryan. I grieved over Ryan. I rebelled because of Ryan. My sweet boy. My fragile boy. My obedient boy who had come to us a few weeks after we’d presented the possibility to him and said, “I don’t want to go to that country you talked about.” His chin had quivered, but he’d dug deep to find the courage to say again, “I really don’t want to go there.”

  So when Sam sat me down to tell me to “trust me and trust God,” I took deep breaths and tried to still the panicked racing of my heart. I dug my fingernails into my palm to quiet my body’s unease. I listened as Sam described again the vision that had sublimated a vague desire into overwhelming devotion to a people he didn’t know. I fought my protective instincts and surrendered them to the commitment I’d made nearly fourteen years before.

  And when he kneeled in front of me, wrung out by the intensity of his belief, and begged me to embark with him on this wild and illogical journey of faith, I felt a threshold rise out of the ashes of my fear and chose, weeping, to step forward with my husband.

  Eleven months passed. Months in which Sam’s single-minded pursuit led him headlong into roadblock after roadblock. With each rejection and obligation to redirect, his confusion had grown deeper. His passion hadn’t waned. But it was muddied now with incomprehension and a crippling sense of powerlessness.

  Sam had a long list of objections to the way things were customarily done in missionary circles. Chief among them was a narrow-minded, linear approach to ministry endeavors rather than the enthusiastic, flexible, and unboundaried vision that drove him. When friends pointed out the advantages of working under an established organization that would provide structure, oversight, and practical support, he countered with grandiose statements about the vastness of God’s structure, oversight, and support.

  Our church elders had their qualms and expressed them in a meeting that turned contentious by the end.

  “How do you know this is of God?”

  “Is anyone else involved in this kind of work?”

  “What mission organization will you go with?”

  “How do you propose to raise the support you need?”

  “What is your timeline?”

  “What is your strategy?”

  Sam’s adamance about going it alone, without the obligations of a sending agency, seemed visionary to him, but it wasn’t shared by the elders he consulted. “We’ll happily reconsider if you change your mind about joining a recognized organization,” our head elder concluded.

  Sam’s jaw was set. “I don’t understand how God would have given us this clear—I mean clear idea of what he wants us to do—then ask us to slam on the brakes while we jump through the hoops of a man-made agency.”

  The meeting ended there. So did our attendance at that church.

  Ryan’s coach had moved him to defense for the game, and I could tell he was frustrated. The variation of soccer his U10 team played was a comical version of what idols like Messi and Beckham did on World Cup stages, but most of the nine- and ten-year-olds’ hearts were in it. None, it seemed to me, as intensely as Ryan’s.

  Nearly a head taller than most of his teammates, his footwork and bursts of speed set him apart from his friends. Ryan excelled as a striker and was wasted in the backfield, and everyone but his new coach seemed to know it.

  There wasn’t much predictability left in our lives these days, and I cherished these spotlit evenings on the soccer field when life took on the appearance of normal. We brought halftime snacks when it was our turn. We stood on the sidelines, blazing heat or pouring rain, and commiserated with other parents. We cheered. We yelled at the refs. We bellowed ridiculous encouragement: Run faster! Kick it in! Don’t give up! Keep on ’im! As if the boys didn’t know what they were there to do.

  After almost three years of being locked in personal and strategic wrangling, there was something about the simplicity of spectating that nourished my soul.

  I watched Ryan as he scrambled to the sidelines for a quick drink from his water bottle during a pause in the soccer game. He seemed focused and somber, a little more so than the rest of his teammates. Not for the first time, I wondered if I should be concerned.

  We’d tried to include Ryan in the labyrinthine progress our path to Nepal was taking. He helped me stuff envelopes, and he went with us to meetings—something I didn’t entirely support—but Sam believed our whole family needed to be seen standing together as we anticipated our move. At first Ryan had whined about the obligation. “I don’t want to meet new people all the time.” Or about the sacrifices his participation required. “But I have a game on Saturday!” Or about being sent to Sunday school classes where he didn’t know anyone. “I want to go to my Sunday school. At our church!”

  As the months wore on, his whining turned into a more pointed dissent. Sometimes the silent, glaring type. Other times, the “It’s not fair!” yelling type. And when either was punctuated with the extra oomph of a slamming door—car or bedroom—it felt all the more distressing.

  Every so often, we’d pull out a book of interesting facts about Nepal after dinner and go through some of them with Ryan—just to give him a feel for the culture’s qualities and quirks, hoping something in them would whet his appetite for the life awaiting him. He suffered through our attempts at engaging him with visible discomfort. Still, we persisted, wanting our son to anticipate with us. More often than not, he ended our conversations with a soft, “I still don’t want to go.”

  He would come around. Sam was sure of it. I was a little less convinced, but eager to believe his predictions were true.

  A phone call from my mom, gently letting us know that she was seeing changes in Ryan, had sent up a flag. I’d been deliberate since then in observing the nine-year-old whose life seemed to revolve around his friends and soccer.

  The changes in him were subtle but unmistakable. Until recently, he’d leapt out of the car in the mornings and gone running into school, backpack bouncing. Now he got out more slowly and walked with a sort of lethargy toward the tall, wide doors of his school. He’d usually exited those doors in the afternoons surrounded by a group of friends—talking, laughing, and planning adventures. But now he came out quite awhile after the initial rush, with just a friend or two … or no one. Before, he’d been quick to volunteer the highlights and frustrations of his day when he
crawled into the backseat. Now he got in, answered a few questions, and fell silent when they stopped coming.

  Inside our home, he was generally obedient and polite. When I’d ask him if he was giving some thought to moving overseas, he’d shrug.

  “Can you tell me why you don’t want to go, honey?”

  “I like it here.”

  I’d look into his face and hope he saw my love. “I get that, Ryan. I like it here too.”

  “Then why do we have to move?”

  “We don’t have to. We want to. We think this could be a really great thing for our family.”

  “What if it isn’t?”

  It was a question that plagued me too. “God wouldn’t call us to something that would harm us.”

  He was a child, and these hypotheticals were well beyond his ability to comprehend, but I could see him contemplating our circumstances as seriously as a nine-year-old could. I prayed he’d come around.

  On a cool March evening, as I watched Ryan protecting the goalie in his bright blue soccer cleats, arms and legs at the ready, eyes on the ball, I saw something different in him. Something leaner. It was hard to put into words, much as I’d tried to express it to Sam—not really a physical thing, though his body was changing as he grew up. I felt like he’d lost a bit of the childhood that rounded his movements and softened his features. He played with the speed and agility he’d always displayed, but there was a sharpness now to his demeanor.

  Sam came back from a chat he was having with one of the other dads and handed me a cup of coffee from the thermos we’d brought. He’d always been a vocal supporter, and this evening was no different. He called encouragement out to Ryan as the other team’s striker charged the goal. The parents lined up along the field with us let out a simultaneous roar. “Get ’im, Ryan! Get ’im!” Sam bellowed. Ryan crouched down a little as the other player approached and prepared to pass the ball to a teammate, but instead of shooting out a leg to intercept the pass, Ryan lunged headfirst into his opponent. Like a human battering ram, he swept the boy off his legs and slammed his upper body to the ground. To my horror, he started pummeling him in the face and shoulders, his blows infantile and aimless.