by Unknown
We both giggled.
“So you do remember little things like that, Claire?” she asked. “You haven’t forgotten our special family jokes?”
“It’s just stuff from the last couple of months that I can’t remember,” I reassured her.
“And you...you still don’t remember anything about...what happened?” she asked carefully.
“No, I don’t.”
“But something else is bothering you, Claire. Are you sure you’re all right?”
For a second her intuitiveness tested my resolve. I almost let it all spill out. I probably should have. But then the moment passed.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” I said, rubbing my forehead.
“I’ll call you this weekend.”
“Sounds good,” I replied. “Bye, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Hours later when the kids were in bed, I was exhausted. Becky called about nine thirty, and I told her that Dan and I decided to just keep our news to ourselves for the time being. I knew I could trust her and Nick to do the same.
“So what exactly did the doctor tell you?” she asked.
“He told me what I already know—that I’m pregnant. He said I’m due in June.”
“So when’s your next doctor’s appointment?” she asked.
“I didn’t make another appointment,” I said.
“You didn’t?”
“I don’t want to go back to that clinic.”
“Why not?”
I chose to make a little joke, hoping Becky would get it and not think I was having an irrational, post trauma moment. “Dr. Chapman wouldn’t call me by my first name.”
“Claire, c’mon. What’s up?”
“Too many memories,” I said after a moment’s pause. “Good ones and bad ones. I don’t want to be in a place I’m familiar with.”
“Do you want to try my doctor, Claire?” she said. “He’s a great guy. Very personable.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t want to decide on doctors right now, Becky. I’ll probably miscarry anyway.”
“Well, isn’t that all the more reason to be under the care of one?” she asked.
She was probably right. But at that moment, it just didn’t motivate me.
“I won’t wait too long, Beck. I promise.”
“I’m going to keep you to that,” she said. “You sound tired. I’ll hang up and let you get to bed.”
I suddenly needed reassurance from another woman—someone I trusted to give me a straight answer—that I wasn’t being a fool.
“Becky, if you were me... if this were happening to you, what would you do?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“All day long I’ve been asking myself that very question, Claire,” she finally said. “I know what I’d like to think I would do. I’d like to think I would be as brave as you.”
“I’m not so brave,” I said. “I’m counting on a miscarriage.”
“Yes, you are brave, Claire,” she said emphatically. “Because you know you may not have a miscarriage. I know you know it. That’s why you asked me what I would do. It takes tremendous courage to do what you believe is right when you know many others would choose to do something different.”
“Then why do I feel foolish?” I said, in not much more than a whisper.
“Maybe it’s not foolishness you feel. Maybe you just feel alone,” she said. “But you’re not alone. You do know that, don’t you?”
At that moment, my two messages from God, in spite of the thirty-four years between them, merged in a way difficult to describe.
The day my dad died, God had somehow communicated to me that he didn’t want me to be afraid. On this October morning three decades later, he had told me the same thing. The first message, which I cannot remember in words but rather in sensation, traveled through time to the moment I was on the phone with Becky, and the second one, the one I had been given that same morning, touched it. And together they folded me into their embrace:
I was not alone, and I did not need to fear the future.
7
When I was still a child, I used to imagine that my father had not been killed in a war in Korea, but that he had just gotten lost there. I had a hard time imagining the place where he had been, and I actually had a hard time remembering him. I could not picture him or his surroundings in any colors except black and white. In fact, I could only picture him one way: immobile and in shades of gray, like the photograph of him. I had on my dresser.
I would mentally place him on a dusty road along a river’s edge, looking for his way home. His black and white body, face frozen in a careful grin, moved along the path in my mind like I moved my dolls across the floor of my room. Sometimes I pictured him stopping to rest or ask for directions. I often imagined him kissing me good night, bending over my bed with his black and white face. Even now I can only see my dad’s face in black and white.
I really only remember snatches of the day my father died, mere snapshots. I remember the morning I woke up with heavenly whispers in my ear. I remember Matt in his highchair, eating little rectangles of buttered toast; I can recall the picture window in our living room, the black car pulling into our driveway, and the man who looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad and who carried no duffel bag. I don’t remember our move from Los Angeles to Minnesota the week after my father’s funeral.
My next memories are of kindergarten in a Saint Cloud classroom, a broken wrist when I was six, and my lingering daydream that Daddy was lost somewhere in Korea.
Later I would learn that my dad had died just weeks before the war ended. This would explain much about why it took my mother so long to get over his death. It seemed so terribly unfair. Another few weeks and he would have been on his way home. And she was deeply in love with him. It would be nearly fourteen years before she would even look at another man.
My father died in May 1953, and the Korean War ended in July. There was talk of an armistice in the months before he died, but nothing had been settled. My dad was part of a strategy to bomb irrigation dams so that floodwaters would destroy critical rail and road networks. His bomber was shot down on this maneuver, though all the dams were successfully destroyed. I suppose that’s why I always pictured him near water when I imagined him trying to find his way home.
In Minnesota we lived with my mother’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Gene. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Gene lived in a suburb of Saint Cloud, in an older house in need of repair but sprawling with extra rooms. Uncle Gene worked part-time for a company that made hoses and fittings, but he and Aunt Elizabeth spent most of their waking hours caring for kids in need of a safe place to live for short periods of time. They were foster parents for the county we lived in but only took kids for the short-term— until a permanent home could be found or conditions at their own homes improved.
Matt and I grew up in that house with dozens of foster kids, none of whom stayed longer than a few months. Aunt Elizabeth always cried when they left, and Uncle Gene always told her they would remember her for the rest of their lives. I learned early not to get too attached to any of them, especially the girls, because they always left.
For quite some time I thought my mother had been amazingly composed during our move. I pictured her summoning a quiet strength from within and then bravely selling our house in California and moving with her two youngsters to Minnesota, a place where she had never lived before.
Actually, my mother was close to being hospitalized because of the intensity of her grief. It was Gene and Elizabeth who took care of everything, including the sale of our house, the move, and getting us settled in the third story of their house.
In hindsight, I suppose it was the best thing for us. My grandparents on my father’s side had offered to take us in too, but they were also awash in grief. And they lived on a farm in Kansas with no neighbors for several miles. That thought alone scared my mother, I’m sure. My mother’s parents, who lived several hours away in F
resno, offered to find us an apartment close to them, but they were going through a tough time of their own. A few years later they divorced.
I guess I don’t have any regrets about leaving California and growing up instead in Minnesota, but I wondered, and still do, how my life would have been different if we had stayed in California.
My mom had no professional skills, though she was an avid reader and knew something about just about everything. For nearly a year after our move, however, she read nothing except the Psalms. Then, a few days before the first anniversary of my father’s death, she began reading other things again. She started bringing books home from the library. Lots of them. I don’t remember this; I was only five. But I know she was still doing it when I was seven, when she started taking me to the library with her. And then she brought Matt. Then she started bringing the foster kids. We would all come home with piles of books. In the evenings we would lose ourselves in the pages of every kind of book imaginable. Sometimes my mother would read aloud to Matt and me and as many as five foster kids. Other times she would pull me into her lap and read to me alone. And sometimes she would pull me into her lap and she would read her book and I would read mine.
Most people would later attribute my choice to become a teacher, especially a high-school literature teacher, to my mother and her devotion to books. And in some ways that’s true. But the older I became, the more I realized she and I devoured books for the same reason. Not for entertainment or even enlightenment. It was for escape. She dealt with the loss of her husband and her own home by escaping into books, and I dealt with the loss of my father and that same home the same way.
Not that there was anything wrong with medicating ourselves with books, but I think knowing it made it seem less a weakness and more like a comfort.
My mother always read more than one book at a time. There were usually five or six on her bedside table or on the coffee table in the living room. Each one was bookmarked, most of the time with coupons for things we didn’t use, like cat food, baby powder, and denture cleaner. The books were never about the same thing. One book might be a biography; another, about the Civil War; another, a classic by Dickens or one of the Bronte sisters; and another, the current bestseller. She usually had a Bible nearby, also bookmarked, but never with a coupon. And there was never more than one bookmark in any of her Bibles.
Mom is the only person I know who reads the Bible cover to cover. She never decides to read Romans or start a study of Ecclesiastes. She always reads it from page one in Genesis to the last page in the Revelation of John. Sometimes reading it takes her six months; sometimes, a year; sometimes, two years. I wouldn’t call my mother a religious person, though I know others do. She has what I call a simple faith in a God who is both powerful and personal. Apparently my dad had the same kind of uncomplicated faith.
She told me once that of all the books she has ever read, she has found the Bible to be the most spectacular book ever written. I suppose she approaches it like it is great literature, in addition to being the Creator’s inspired word, and that’s why she has always read it from beginning to end. It surprised me, then, to learn that when she was grieving for my father, she read only the Psalms. She told me this when I was eleven.
“I wasn’t actually reading them,” she said when I asked her why. “I was praying them.”
I told her I didn’t understand what she meant.
She told me that because she was so sad, she couldn’t pray her usual way but felt a crushing need to pour out her heart to God. She told me she had to keep talking to him so that she wouldn’t start to blame him for what happened. So she read the Psalms for a whole year, and they were her prayers.
I remember asking her if it worked. “You never blamed God for what happened?” I said when she asked me what I meant by “worked.”
She considered my question for a moment, no doubt weighing its significance to my blossoming understanding of God.
“I know God could have stopped it from happening,” she said. “He could have kept Daddy safe that day, like he had all the other days of the war. But it was war. We knew he was in danger. The world is not a safe place, Claire; only heaven is. This is not heaven. And we cannot expect it to be like it.”
Then she told me something that I found utterly remarkable.
“If God had come to me before I met your daddy and told me I was going to marry a wonderful man who would love me completely, that we would have two precious, beautiful children, that I would experience unequaled joy, but that this good man would be taken from me after only eight years, I would have told him I still want to meet that man; I still want to marry him.”
“Why?” I had asked.
“Because,” she said, drawing me close. “When I look at you and Matthew, I know I would have wanted God to change nothing.”
I was amazed at her insight and awed by her love for Matthew and me.
“But you were so sad when Daddy died.”
“I missed him so much, Claire,” she said. “And I still do. And it’s okay for us to miss him.”
“But don’t you wonder why God let it happen?” I asked.
Again, I can remember her taking her time choosing what she would say next. I would remember her next words always.
“For a long time I did want to know why,” she finally said. “It seemed to me I deserved an answer. Your daddy was a good man and a good father. And he loved God. But deep down, I knew that sometimes God’s reasons for doing things or not doing things are as deep as his character. Being supplied with a reason when maybe I wouldn’t have been able to understand it might have made it worse for me.”
She drew me even closer and cuddled me so that my head rested in the special place between her neck and chin. “Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.”
I never looked at the sky the same way after that. There would be many times over the course of my life when I would wonder what in the world God was up to. Sometimes I would look at the abused, neglected, and unloved children that found their way to my aunt and uncle’s house and wonder if God saw their pain, why he did nothing. I asked my uncle this once, and he said, “Why, Claire, he’s brought them here to us,” like it was the easiest thing in the world to see.
But I knew there were many other kids who had no safe place to go to escape suffering. It didn’t seem fair, and I knew what I really wanted was a heaven on earth, where no one suffered at all. Ever. But after that day, whenever I wrestled with why people suffered, I always thought of my mother and the sky, and I learned to comfort myself with the knowledge that when the question is complex, the answer is too. I learned to be at peace with a sky that is blue for no given reason at all.
In the coming months people would assume this was the question that troubled me most: Why? Why had God let this happen to me? Well-meaning friends would feel compelled to say, “We know God has a reason for everything,” or “God must have a wonderful purpose for allowing this to happen.” And while I didn’t doubt their sincerity, I did wonder if they had stopped to think before they spoke. Obviously they had never stopped to consider if God had a wonderful and good reason for making the sky blue instead of red.
I wasn’t overly perplexed by the “why.” What awoke me in the middle of the night, disrupted my thoughts when I tried to read a bedtime story to Spence, and haunted my quiet moments alone in the house was the “what.”
What was to become of my marriage, my family, and me when this was over? What would I be like at the end of the journey? What would I see in the mirror a year, two years, ten years from now? What did I want to see? Those were the questions for which there did not seem to be any answers.
8
The next few days felt like I was preparing for a long trip, like I was org
anizing my affairs for a long journey, and time was of the essence. For the first time since I got home from the hospital, I began to set my alarm so I would be up before the kids, up even before Dan. The first ten minutes of my day I spent hugging the toilet in the master bathroom until the morning sickness subsided. It was how I oriented myself to the reality of each new day. The morning sickness daily reminded me of what was in store for me, and after I threw up and showered, I read the Psalms. I even set my alarm on Saturday, so that I would be through with the morning bathroom routine before anyone else was awake.
The kids were thrilled to have me back in their morning routine, and Spence told me—after the first day—that he didn’t even mind that I made peanut butter and jelly for his lunch when he told me back in August that he was tired of it. I began taking Katie, Spencer, plus Nick and Becky’s twin boys to school again in the mornings. Becky insisted she bring them home since that had been our previous arrangement. I started to pay the bills again and do the grocery shopping and run errands.
Dan was pensive about my “jumping back into things,” as he liked to call it. He made me promise to call Patty and get her opinion on my resuming day-to-day responsibilities. He didn’t ask me to tell her about the pregnancy, though, which surprised me, because that very thing was what had motivated me to reclaim—as much as possible—my normal life.
I called the superintendent of the high school where I had been teaching and told him I had a letter for the school board asking if I might have an extended leave of absence due to medical reasons. He was very understanding. He assured me that surviving a violent attack on my life was more than sufficient cause for a year’s leave. He told me to send him the letter and not to worry a moment over it. So I did.
I attended a church service for the first time since the attack the following Sunday, wearing a favorite turtleneck so that the pale yellow bruising on my neck wouldn’t startle anyone. People were genuinely glad to see me, several hugged me with tears in their eyes, and I wondered how much Nick had told them. The police had been careful to keep my name out of the papers and news reports, but many of these people were friends, and I’m sure they knew the unnamed woman abducted from a mall parking lot, assaulted, nearly strangled, and left for dead, was me.