eight
I can’t be sure where the dream started and the world stopped.
The next thing I remember is the black circle. Just like before, on the floor between my bed and the door in my childhood bedroom. A deep black hole with a gray ring around the circumference, maybe an arm’s-length across, no more.
In the dream, if it’s a dream at all, I’m sitting up in my bed in the dark watching the closed door. I have a certainty the door will open, it’s just a matter of time, and the wait is excruciating. I’m just a boy, maybe eleven years old. It’s the day Mr. Walker told me my father died on the train tracks. My mother took me home from school early, and I remember it started raining right after dark. A steady, heavy rain.
I sat in my bed, waiting for my father to come home. He always came to my bedroom when he got home late from work, and I always, always, waited for him before I fell asleep. From my bed I could hear the car door slam in the driveway, and then a few seconds later the front door would close quietly. He always closed the front door quietly so he wouldn’t wake my mother. She went to sleep early, and it wasn’t good to wake her up, so we didn’t.
After I’d hear the front door shut, I’d wait, smiling in the dark, for my father. The doorknob would turn. I could see it, and in the dream it turned so slowly, but I didn’t move. After all, it was the day they told me my father died. It was the day I was asked to believe he’d never come home to me again. Never hold me. Never take my hand in his hand, or throw the football in the front yard, or tell me about baseball. It was the final test between a child’s life and God’s real world. A world where people die and just never come back, like a butterfly in a storm.
I can’t move. It’s like I’m frozen again. The doorknob turns. My father’s coming home and the black hole on the floor waits between him and me.
The door opens slowly, and there he is. He looks perfectly normal. No bandages or blood. No scratches on his face from the glass shattered by the impact of the hundred-ton locomotive barreling down the tracks to places unknown.
He smiles at me. The same smile from the picture. Mischievous, like we’re in on something together. A secret. But I want to tell him about the black hole. I want to warn him before he walks to my bed to hug me the way he does every night. I can’t speak. All I can do is sit there and look at him.
The door opens wider and he takes two steps to me. I’m not allowed to close my eyes, only watch my father begin to fall into the black circle on the floor, and in an instant he is gone, the room quiet again, rain coming down on the roof of the house. I am alone.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. The light is dim and the window dark. Tubes are hanging down across my chest. Next to the bed, on my left, sits Allen. His face is down resting in his hands. It’s just the two of us in the room.
At first I want him to know I’m awake, but then I remember what I’ve told him. I want to reach out and touch his hair, but I’m too far away, and maybe he doesn’t want me to touch him. Maybe there’s a black circle between us, unseen by me, but between us nonetheless. Just resting in the short distance between my hospital bed and his chair.
I watch Allen in the silence. The marrow of life exists in the moments in between. Those moments before and after the violent upheavals and admissions of futility. For the birth of a child is meaningless without expectation, and the death of a parent is hollow in the absence of memory. And though we are forged by a handful of events, some dramatic, it is those moments in between, waiting for life to happen, when we discover who we have become. When the violent upheavals and admissions of futility resonate, harden, and reveal themselves for what they are.
I must have fallen back asleep, or maybe not, but I am in my workshop with Little Early. He looks at me the way I remember looking at my grandfather, and I reach out to touch his face, holding my fingers to his warm smooth cheek, and he lets me do it without pulling away. Like he is me, and I am him, and we’re making something together in my grandfather’s basement, the smell of cedar soft in the air.
But before we can start, I am off again, in and out, coming to rest at the high school baseball field. The grass is amazingly green, and I sit in the aluminum home field bleachers, alone, on a bright blue day. Across, on the other side, sits Kate. She has a textbook open in her lap and looks out into center field, freshly mowed. We are the only two people in sight, and I watch Kate Shepherd close her eyes and take a deep breath.
I am in the kitchen with my mother, just a few days away from leaving for college. She is standing, leaning against the refrigerator, arms crossed over a long, faded blue nightshirt.
“Do you ever think of Dad?” I ask.
She studies me and then smiles just a little bit. It gets the best of her, just like he did, and she goes ahead and lets the smile remain.
“Sometimes,” she says, and I know it’s true, but more importantly, she allows me to know.
There’s a far-off flash of light, like lightning in the distance too far away to hear the thunder, and I am with Gretchen at the ice cream parlor, sitting outside under a big white umbrella. We’re waiting to go the matinee. Just enough time for ice cream. Gretchen has a scoop of birthday cake ice cream in a cup made of white chocolate with colorful sprinkles.
She looks up at me and takes her first bite. A smile comes across my little girl’s face, genuine and pure, and I start to cry. I can feel the tears roll slowly down my face, and instead of wiping them away I just let them roll down.
“Daddy,” she says, “how much does the sky weigh?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I say. “I really don’t know.”
I wake up again. It’s daytime. Feels like early morning. Allen is standing at the window with his back to me. We are very still, and I wonder if I am dying. Wonder if all of it has come to this, waiting for Allen to turn. Waiting for his decision.
One moment I see Allen’s back, and the next moment I am looking out of the window of the hospital, seeing the world for the last time through someone else’s eyes. Allen’s eyes, looking across the parking lot to the buildings on the other side, watching a tall pine tree sway in the morning breeze.
This time it goes further. This time I can feel what Allen feels. The forgiveness is an entity. It exists like a stone, heavy and solid, inside his body, and it is the only thing in this world worth knowing.
I turn from the window and look at myself in the hospital bed, tired and gaunt, much like my mother when I was called to her bedside, but Allen sees me differently. He sees himself in me, and as I walk slowly across the room, the past, the present, and the future melt together to form something entirely new for me. I am not alone anymore, and never will be again.
Allen places his hand upon my shoulder, and I am allowed to feel the touch on both the shoulder and the hand. A gentle squeeze. Assurance. Resurrection. With no words spoken, I am forgiven, and Allen’s hand on my shoulder is the last thing I remember before the beginning of the gentle slide into light, when everything you ever wondered makes sense. When the enormously personal journey ends in the reflection of God on the surface of the cool water.
Acknowledgments
David Poindexter, Kate Nitze, Sherilyn McNally, Scott Bidwell, Shauna Mosley, Steve Johnson, Michael Dasinger, Sharon Hoiles, Sonny Brewer, Michael and Jillian Strecker, Kevin and Carolyn Shannon, Kip and Shannon Howard, Frank and Virginia Hollon, Sara and Skip Wyatt, Sally Hollon, Hoss Mack, Marion Bolar, Austin McAdoo, Gladden Statom, Fred White, Rich Green, Allison, Dusty, Mary Grace, Lilly, Smokey Davis, Chris D’Arienzo, Robbie Boyd, Kyle Jennings, Aleta Dasinger, Paige Benson, Tank and Janet Dasinger, Melissa and Julie, Weber, Joel Stabler, Stephanie Wheeler, Russ Copeland, Will Kimbrough, Joyce Miller, Helene Holmes, Joshilyn Jackson, Brietta, Hilary, Anne, Pete Ware, and Pat Walsh. Thanks.
Table of Contents
Front
Table of Contents
Part 1 Chapter 1
Part 1 Chapter 2
Part 1 Chapter 3
Part 1 Chapter 4
Part 1 Chapter 5
Part 1 Chapter 6
Part 1 Chapter 7
Part 1 Chapter 8
Part 1 Chapter 9
Part 1 Chapter 10
Part 1 Chapter 11
Part 2 Chapter 1
Part 2 Chapter 2
Part 2 Chapter 3
Part 2 Chapter 4
Part 2 Chapter 6
Part 2 Chapter 7
Part 2 Chapter 8
Part 3 Chapter 1
Part 3 Chapter 2
Part 3 Chapter 3
Part 3 Chapter 4
Part 3 Chapter 5
Part 3 Chapter 6
Part 3 Chapter 7
Part 3 Chapter 8
Part 4 Chapter 1
Part 4 Chapter 2
Part 4 Chapter 3
Part 4 Chapter 4
Part 4 Chapter 5
Part 4 Chapter 6
Part 4 Chapter 7
Part 4 Chapter 8
Acknowledgements
The Wait Page 25