Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  While Sam and I stood frozen, one of the coaches ran out to the field and pulled Ryan off his opponent, forcefully holding him away as Ryan wiggled in his hold and finally broke free. He yelled, “Get off me!” at his coach, kicked some grass at the other player who was now sitting where he’d fallen, then swiveled and ran off the field toward the locker room.

  Sam and I just stared—first at the mayhem as coaches from both teams converged on the boy Ryan had mowed down, then at each other. I had no idea what my expression was, but Sam’s went from shock, to bewilderment, to fury in the few seconds it took him to process what he’d just seen.

  He took off for the locker room in a half run, tension in his gait.

  Neither spoke a word as they came out of the locker room, skirted the field, and headed for our car. Ryan didn’t look up. He walked with his head down, his hood pulled up, and his hands burrowed into his pockets. Sam carried Ryan’s sports bag, his face set. He stopped long enough to exchange a few words with the coach while Ryan continued his pained walk toward the car. I sat in the passenger seat and Ryan crawled in the back. Sam sat behind the wheel after he’d closed the driver’s door and said nothing.

  After a few moments, he turned the key in the ignition and we drove home.

  There was no postgame analysis going on as we entered the house. No instructions to finish his homework or come to the kitchen for a snack.

  “Living room,” Sam said, and Ryan, still in his coat, made his way to the couch.

  I didn’t know what to do. We had never, in all his life, had to confront him about that kind of behavior. I wasn’t sure if Sam wanted me involved or if this would be better handled as a father-son moment. I figured I should be there just to lend words, as neither of them seemed inclined to speak. I finally heard Sam inhale and braced for what he’d say.

  Ryan burst into tears before Sam started to speak. The rigidness of his carriage melted into sobs as he curled up on the couch and leaned sideways against the backrest.

  I glanced at Sam, wanting to go over and comfort the boy whose crying was convulsing his body, but Sam shook his head. He moved to the chair by the fireplace and sat, elbows braced on his knees, eyes on his son. We let Ryan cry until the sobs had receded into hiccups. Still, his face was turned into the couch, covered by the hood of the coat he hadn’t yet removed.

  Sam leaned forward and scratched the back of his head in a gesture of frustration. There was incomprehension and anger on his face.

  “What was that, son?” he asked, his voice tight, his eyes seeking Ryan’s.

  Ryan started crying again.

  “Sam …” I pleaded. He shook his head again, more firmly this time.

  “Ryan, I need you to stop your crying. Now.”

  Ryan glanced at his dad around his raised hood, fear in his eyes, and I could tell he was trying his hardest to stem his tears. But I could also see, wedged into the sadness and shame on his face, the glint of something steely and unyielding. He looked away and I could hear him working on his breathing, trying to take steadier breaths.

  It wounded me to watch him agonize. I wanted to go to him, to pull him against me and stroke his hair, to whisper calming words into his ear. But Sam had made his wishes clear, and the intensity of his expression brooked no argument.

  “What was that, Ryan?” Sam said again, when Ryan’s breathing had settled.

  “I don’t know.” His voice was small but defiant.

  “Did you know that kid?”

  He shook his head.

  This time, Sam’s voice was commanding. “Ryan—look at me.”

  The eyes our son turned on his father were scared but challenging. I felt tears forming in my own. This wasn’t my Ryan …

  “What—was—that?”

  Ryan threw up his hands and cried, “I don’t know, okay?” His eyebrows were drawn fiercely together and I could see him calling on every ounce of his willpower to stop from bursting into tears again.

  “It had to be something! Ryan, you don’t just … attack another player like that! Do you know what that looked like? And how many people saw it? What were you thinking?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Ryan yelled, eyes wide and stunned. He seemed to catch himself and squared his shoulders as his eyes narrowed into angry slits. “The stupid coach!” he spat. “Why’d he make me play defense?”

  “You’ll be lucky if he lets you play at all after that stunt.”

  “Fine! I don’t care anyway!” He got up and stormed toward the stairs, ripping at the zipper on his coat.

  “Sit—down!” Sam’s voice was as fierce as I’d ever heard it.

  Ryan turned and yelled, “No! You can’t make me!”

  “Ryan …” I stood up and took a step forward, appalled by the turn this confrontation was taking.

  He turned on me. “No, Mom!” And I saw fresh tears forming in his eyes. “He can’t make me! You can’t make me!” He turned and rushed up the stairs to his room.

  I turned on Sam. “Really?”

  Sam was still sitting. His face pale. His jaw set. “You saw what he did. He needed to be called on it.”

  “But not like that! Not in the state he’s in!”

  Sam’s voice was still hard. “He needs to understand how inappropriate that behavior was.”

  “He’s a kid. He has a lot going on …”

  “He assaulted another player. And he did it in front of—”

  I had a moment of clarity. “In front of other people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? That’s your greatest concern?”

  Sam opened his mouth to answer, then closed it, staring at me. He shook his head. “What are you saying?”

  I came at him then. “I’m pointing out that the greater concern here should be that a kid who has never behaved this way before just stood in this room and yelled at you.” I was done hiding my tears. My voice rose another notch. “And before that, he sat there and sobbed for a while. And before that, he tackled some kid on the soccer field with the kind of …” I couldn’t find the word. “Ferocity—the kind of ferocity I have never, ever seen in that boy.”

  “Lauren …”

  “So you go right ahead and sit there fuming because the other parents saw the missionaries’ kid losing it in public. You go right ahead, Sam. I’m going upstairs to talk to our son because there’s clearly something major going on that we—should—care about.”

  I marched out of the room and up the stairs before Sam had a chance to answer.

  It took me a few moments to compose myself before entering Ryan’s bedroom. “Ryan?” I pushed the door open a crack. He lay on his side, facing the wall. His coat was in a heap on the floor by his bed. I felt the bottom fall out of my resilience. My little boy.

  He flinched when I touched his hair and moved his head away. I paused, my hand suspended. I prayed. Please, God. Please. I sat on the edge of his bed and laid my hand against his hair again. This time he didn’t flinch. He didn’t move away.

  We sat in silence as several long minutes ticked by, me stroking his hair and him utterly still. When I thought I could speak without losing my composure, I said as softly as I could, “What’s going on, honey?” Silence. He shifted against his Transformers pillow. “Did something happen at school?” He shook his head. “Is it something Daddy and I did?” He didn’t move. “Ryan, I’d like for you to look at me. Can you do that, please?” I let another minute pass, my hand now in my lap, and listened to him breathe. He finally turned to face me, knees drawn up. His eyes glanced off my face, then looked down and away.

  I slipped off the bed onto my knees and brought my eyes even with his, propping my chin on my hands. “So,” I started quietly, trying to keep any trace of anger or disappointment out of my voice. “I’m guessing there’s something that’s making you unhappy.” He glanced up, then down again. “Am I right?”

  He nodded against his pillow.

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  I saw fresh tears flo
od his eyes as his chin began to quiver.

  “Ryan?”

  His eyebrows came together in a frown. “I don’t know,” he said. This time his eyes locked with mine, spilling their tears over the bridge of his nose, down his face, and into his hair. He hiccupped a little and curled into a tighter ball. There was confusion and fear on his face. “I don’t know what it is, Mom.” And he started to cry in earnest again.

  I shushed him and told him I loved him, that all the changes were hard on me too, that I was grieving about leaving our home and that I understood how sadness can look like other things sometimes—like anger or disobedience. I assured him that Sam and I loved him and that we’d figure this out together.

  I saw movement by the door and knew Sam stood there. He loved his son. He had loved him and protected him since that moment nearly ten years ago when he’d stood in our bedroom and done his happy dance. I looked up at my husband and hoped my gaze conveyed my trust. He came into the room and lowered himself to the floor beside me, his legs bent and an arm draped over Ryan’s blanketed form.

  We all stayed like that for a while. There would be time later for more questions. Time for apologies and for reweaving the thin fabric of our family’s happiness.

  That’s what I thought.

  “I know these past few months have been hard, son,” Sam said.

  Don’t say “but,” I thought. Please don’t say “but.”

  “But God wants us to help kids like you in Nepal, and temper tantrums like the one you had tonight aren’t going to change that.”

  Anger tingled across my face. Please, God. Please, I prayed again. And even as the words surged through my spirit, I felt my son withdraw from Sam … and me.

  Sam’s projected departure date came and went, and still we struggled on. Desperation, a fickle emotion, seemed to either pummel or propel us. For Sam, it was about getting to Nepal and launching full-throttle into the work he’d already been pursuing as much as he could from a distance. His exhaustion was physical, in part because of the hours and effort he was putting in to shore up enough support, and in part because the unrelenting optimism that fueled his work was such an energy-sapping, soul-depleting thing to maintain.

  For Ryan, the desperation was much more subterranean. We hadn’t seen much of his anger since the soccer incident. He’d mostly kept it under wraps from that day forward. But I could see it in the quick steely flash that would brighten his eyes for a moment, then be replaced by a dullness I found more alarming than the temper. It was in the clipped words, mutinous glares, careless shrugs that seemed to come at random. Some days he was the Ryan we’d always known. Responsive and talkative. Then something would trigger his darker disposition, and he’d sink into what seemed a deliberate withdrawal from enjoyment and connection. I was sure the weariness that sagged his shoulders and slowed his steps in those moments was the side effect of such a young soul living with so much dread.

  It was Ryan who fueled my desperation to get to Kathmandu. Watching my son disappear into a harder, quieter, deader boy felt like my undoing. I would tell Sam he had to speak to him—father to son—since mother to son didn’t seem to be effective anymore. Maybe he could coax some answers or at least a reaction—any reaction—out of him. And Sam would climb the stairs to Ryan’s room. I’d listen from downstairs, trying to read significance into creaking floorboards and portions of words.

  As time passed and we remained stateside, supporters who had started sending donations stopped—perhaps because the grand plan Sam had outlined for them didn’t include years of living in our old house, in our old town, with little evidence of an imminent move across the world. Some called to explain their decision, promising to resume giving when we finally got to Kathmandu. Others never called or wrote. Their checks just stopped coming.

  Still, Sam labored on with the tenacity of a man whose very existence revolved around the completion of a singular goal. I hurt for him. I hurt for the frustrations that tightened his shoulders and the disappointments that bowed them. I hurt for the joyous, dynamic, convicted presentations he gave to tiny groups and individuals whose watch-checking and blank faces eviscerated his efforts. I hurt for the forced optimism in his voice on days when we seemed to be losing more ground than we gained. I hurt for the troubled gaze he cast on Ryan when he didn’t realize I was watching.

  We delved deeper into our past and located every former friend and colleague we could think of, presenting our cause and praying for that miracle.

  It came in the form of Sullivan.

  After I sent a tentative introductory e-mail, she came sweeping back into our lives with a squeal of delight, a flurry of questions, and a little black book (blue, in her case) filled with the contact information of corporations and individuals looking for tax deductions. She saw the passion in Sam’s eyes and the determination in mine and said, “Well, hey—let’s get this show on the road!”

  The plane had started its descent a few minutes earlier. I strained against my seat belt, trying to lean far enough over Ryan’s sleeping form to see out the window. Only clouds. Sam stirred on the other side of me and grunted as he stretched his legs.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  I shook my head and adjusted the brightness of the small screen embedded in the seat in front of me. I was halfway through the second movie of this leg of the trip. It wasn’t exactly riveting, but it kept my mind occupied. Though Sam and Ryan had fallen asleep shortly after takeoff, exhausted by the thirteen-hour flight that had taken us from Chicago to Abu Dhabi, I’d remained awake. I liked to think it was the excitement of landing in a little over an hour that had kept me from sleeping, but I suspected it was an emotion of a much different nature.

  The relief that had come over me when we finally got on that first flight had sharp edges. We’d succeeded. We’d drummed up a small army of partners who believed enough in what we had envisioned to put their enthusiasm and pocketbooks behind it. We’d exited the long process of preparation on bruised knees, our prayers finally answered, but our hearts injured by the protracted battle for miracles that had always felt just beyond our reach. And now that our headlong leap was approaching its landing, though I tried to muster the exhilaration that should cap such an extraordinary moment, all I felt was a disheartening blend of weariness and wariness.

  I knew they were the logical conclusion of our years-long toil—the missionary version of post-traumatic stress: erratic, hair-trigger responses and unshakable flashes of disturbing scenes. Like driving away from the house in which we’d welcomed and raised Ryan. Like dropping off the remainder of our furniture, some of it wedding gifts, at the Salvation Army a couple days before our flight. Like saying good-bye to my dad over the phone, knowing I wouldn’t be there when he went in for bypass surgery in just a few weeks. Like watching Ryan say good-bye to his friends, then run back to the van with a desperate anger stiffening his legs.

  And here we were. Thirty thousand feet and falling. Exhausted by over twenty hours in the air, but so close … so close. A hint of panic tightened my lungs. I breathed deeply, shut off the screen in front of me, and leaned over Ryan again to see out the window. The clouds had broken. Nepal was finally in sight.

  As our plane continued its descent over lush green hills and brown valleys, clusters of homes began to dot the landscape, nearly camouflaged against the brown earth save for their geometric shapes. Then came larger buildings. Tall, rectangular, multistoried forms with gaping windows. Yellows, greens, grays, and terra-cottas. They seemed arranged randomly, in clumps that lined serpentine roads—a small river here, a patch of trees there.

  “Ryan,” I said, excitement and trepidation in my voice. “Ryan, wake up!”

  He was frowning before his eyes even opened, but even his most laborious attempts at a poker face failed when he followed my gaze to the airplane window and saw Nepal materializing out of the mist.

  “Would you look at that,” Sam said behind me. I thought I heard something catch in his throat and turn
ed to find tears gathering in his eyes and a huge smile on his face. He grabbed my hand and held it tight. I squeezed it back and let my eyes travel over his face. The maverick, the tenacious visionary, the indefatigable pursuer.

  Ryan stared mutely out the window. From the heights where we flew, the landscape and structures looked Seussian. His eyes moved quickly, taking in the details that appeared and disappeared as the plane flew forward. I could feel something growing in him, something he might have expressed before our calling had extinguished his communicating.

  “What do you think?” Sam asked.

  “It’s fine,” Ryan said without conviction, his eyes never straying from the Nepali countryside unfolding under the plane’s wings.

  Sam and I exchanged glances. At least he hadn’t said, “It sucks.”

  Tribhuvan International Airport was a small collection of buildings on the east side of the capital, with one runway, two terminals, and interminable lines. A sign along the long walk from the plane to the security checkpoint had tried to warn us. The vodka advertisement, clearly intended for foreigners, read, “Things to be done take time in Nepal, so relax & chill out.”

  We waited for over an hour to clear customs, a process lengthened by the need to purchase our visas on the spot. There was neither urgency nor efficiency in the procedures, and the passengers who appeared to have been through this before merely surrendered to the system and leaned on walls or on their carry-ons, biding their time.

  The small terminal resonated with the sounds of barely contained chaos. It was in a mildly shell-shocked state that we found the luggage area and waited for our bags to appear. I tried to school my features into something blasé as I began to grasp how different this world was from the one I’d spent nearly five years now trying to escape. I’d expected the language to be an adjustment, but there was so much more to this foreignness than that. It was in every nuance of every space, person, and object I could see. In every sound. In every aroma. It was like being shoved, slowly and irrevocably, into a tidal wave of newness that felt destabilizing and taxing.