The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  “Ed,” John said, embarrassed to be seen this way. “How did you ....”

  “Jillian called me late last night,” he said. “She asked me to come over and check on you.”

  The box of letters, Jillian in Ohio, the child – it all came back to him in an instant. John looked away into the woods. He wasn’t sure if he was mad at Jillian, at himself, or just confused about what to do next.

  “She told me about Karl,” Ed said.

  “She didn’t tell me,” John said without emotion. “I had to find out by reading a bunch of letters.”

  Ed opened a large thermos of coffee and poured a mug for John, and then, to John’s surprise, picked up the bottle of whisky and added the last ounce to the coffee.

  “I wouldn’t recommend this as a regular habit, John, but it will make you feel better.”

  John smiled, then grabbed at his aching head with one hand and took the cup with the other.

  “You must be an old pro at this,” John groaned.

  “If only you knew,” Ed grinned.

  They sat in silence for several minutes as John allowed the warm drink to put some life back in his body. The woods were peaceful and quiet, but a little cold, and John suddenly realized that he was wrapped in one of his own blankets.

  Ed pulled out his cell phone. “Jillian told me where to find the spare key.”

  John nodded and took another long sip of his coffee. He looked over at Ed and smiled. He felt his throat tighten up as he thought about what this man had done, just to be a good friend.

  “Thanks.”

  Ed shook his head as if it was nothing, and they sat still for a few minutes on the damp earth.

  “So let’s head back to the house and then go out for some breakfast,” Ed said. “But I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to give me an answer right away. You just think about it. Agreed?”

  John nodded, and then got up and started to fold the blanket and brush the dirt off his jacket.

  “I want you to try to think this whole thing through from Jillian’s perspective,” Ed continued. “Why do you think she didn’t tell you about Karl?”

  John nodded. “Yeah,” he said. But Jillian’s not the problem.

  Chapter 9 – Karl

  The last time Jillian had seen Karl, other than in pictures, was ten years ago, when she handed over the week-old infant to Norma and Ivan Stevenson. She had thought that was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do. But now, after a day of helpless waiting, Norma was dead, and she could only watch as the hospital chaplain waked the boy, sleeping on a sofa in one of the hospital waiting rooms, to give him the news.

  She wanted to run in and take him in her arms and comfort him – to tell him that she would take care of him forever – but the reality of her situation was like a sword piercing her heart. To him, she was a perfect stranger, and she had no right to intrude in his life. Also, there was John. She couldn’t make any decisions about Karl on her own.

  Karl sat as still as a stone, staring into the pastor’s face as he gave the news. His lips began to pout. The corners of his mouth turned down and his face grew red and blotchy. Tears started to fill his eyes, but then they stopped. He sat like that for a solid minute as the news sank in, and Jillian, hidden from his view by a dark-glass window, thought her heart would burst.

  She began to sob uncontrollably and turned away, right into John’s arms.

  Surprise at his presence at the hospital was overcome by the pain that gushed out in convulsing sobs. Her longing for Karl, her grief for Norma and her guilt about hiding it all from John poured out of her. If John hadn’t been holding her up, she would have collapsed on the tiled floor from grief and lack of sleep.

  John held her in the hospital corridor, oblivious to the glances of nurses, patients and visitors, until she spent herself empty, exhausted, and not entirely awake or aware of her surroundings.

  The chaplain and two adults had taken Karl away, so John took Jillian into the waiting room and sat next to her on the couch. After several minutes, Jillian looked up at John with a questioning gaze. How did you get here? What do you think of me? What do I do now? All that and more was written in her face.

  “So that’s my son?” he asked. “He looks like a fine boy.”

  Jillian buried her face in his chest and started crying all over again.

  * * *

  As John walked Jillian out of the hospital, he stopped by the chaplain’s office and slipped an envelope under the door.

  “What’s that?” Jillian asked.

  “Do you know where Karl’s gonna be tomorrow?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s a letter, explaining our circumstances, with your cell-phone number.”

  “John, don’t take this wrong,” she said as they walked out the glass double doors towards John’s rental car, “I appreciate you being here more than I can say, but why do you care? I thought you’d be disgusted with me.”

  John stopped at the curb and turned to face her.

  “I was angry that you hadn’t told me the truth, but Ed helped straighten me out. And Fr. Miller.”

  “Fr. Miller?” she asked, slightly alarmed. “What’s he got to do with it?” The Roman Catholic priest had been instrumental in John’s conversion to Christianity, and John had a lot of respect for him. Jillian didn’t share it.

  “It was Ed’s idea.”

  Jillian looked surprised. “So what did he say?”

  John shook his head and grimaced. “Not too much, really. Mostly he asked the right questions. Would I have preferred that you’d killed the boy? Would I have preferred that you stayed in whatever situation got you pregnant? And whatever that was, didn’t it make sense that you’d want to put it behind you? Just stuff like that,” John said. “And I began to see that, on the bigger issues, at least, you’ve done the honorable thing. You were too young to care for the child, so you bore him and put him up for adoption with a loving family. And since then, you’ve been sure that he was well-provided for.”

  “You’re making me sound like a saint,” Jillian protested with a quavering voice. “Aren’t you forgetting that I also kept all this from the man I love more than anything in the world? And aren’t you curious how I got pregnant in the first place?”

  John turned away and unlocked the car door. He paused for a moment before answering.

  “I’d like to talk about those things ... but we can do that later. I didn’t fly out here to dig into your past, but to help you through this week.”

  Jillian kissed him, got into the car and began crying again.

  “Have you been drinking enough fluids? I’m getting worried about all that water you’re losing.”

  Jillian laughed and cried as John drove them to a hotel.

  * * *

  While Jillian slept the evening away on the queen-sized bed in the hotel room, John went out to get some Chinese food and a bottle of wine for dinner.

  As he drove around the unfamiliar streets of Columbus, Ohio, he kept thinking back to the morning’s conversation with Ed, and then to Fr. Miller’s relentless assault on his fit of self-pity. It was almost as if the priest had heard him shouting at God in anger the night before. Or, perhaps, enough of those same frustrations came out in his words that Fr. Miller was able to piece it all together.

  In any event, he convinced John to face the fact that his trust in God had died almost as soon as it had begun. He was even able to pinpoint the experience that caused the crisis. It was Christopher Dawson’s book, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. John couldn’t believe the overwhelming suffering and destruction that the church had experienced, and it challenged his notion of a benevolent God. One passage in particular had gripped his imagination and his memory, and he could almost cite it by heart.

  “The Vikings do not cease to slay and carry away the Christian people, and to destroy churches and towns. Everywhere there is nothing but dead bodies – clergy and laymen, nobles and commoners, women and chil
dren. There is no road or place where the ground is not covered with corpses. We live in distress and anguish before this spectacle of the destruction of the Christian people.”

  When John recited the words to Fr. Miller, the priest nodded thoughtfully, and then said, matter-of-factly, “And you can’t understand why, after they turned to God, the newly Christian, European lands suffered so horribly.”

  John nodded, and then added a few more examples of Christians being left to suffer – not only from history, but from current events.

  “It’s as simple and as complex as this, John. You’re thinking of God the way a child does. ‘If I’m good, God will protect me.’”

  John had remembered his study of Job, and how he longed to see some other answer to the question of suffering. But after all the speeches and posturing of Job and his friends, the only answer is that God is God, thank-you, and man should keep his place and his silence before Him. That was either no comfort at all, or all the comfort in the world.

  “And along with that,” Fr. Miller continued, “you’ve bought into a very limited concept of faith. Faith isn’t just a matter of believing that your sins are forgiven. There’s more to Christianity than that. You’re united to Christ in your baptism, and you accept the rules of His Kingdom – taking His yoke – and part of that means realizing that He’ll conform you to His image – make you like Him – a little Christ. Christ’s Kingdom isn’t for sissies, John. He came to redeem the world by suffering and dying for it.

  “The true mystery isn’t that Christians have suffered. The true mystery is that some of us live in peace and ease and die in our sleep on satin bed sheets. We’re united to a Savior whose ministry in this world is through redemptive suffering. Maybe you forget that we put a crucifix right in the front of the church.”

  As John turned left across the highway toward the Peking Palace, he could still hear the words in his ears, and he could still feel the revulsion in his gut against the concept. Hadn’t Aslan feasted the children in Narnia, let them dance with the satyrs and drink the wine of Bacchus? Why couldn’t God be like that? Instead, He led His people out of Egypt into the dessert, where He fed them bread and water, and then got angry when they craved something better to eat.

  But John had never seen Fr. Miller in such a mood. He was relentless. He insisted that anyone who thought this world was a party had only to look to the cross to see otherwise. “It was necessary – necessary, John, think about that – for God to redeem the world by sending His Son to atone for sins by being tortured to death. And Christ didn’t offer a frolic in the woods to His disciples. He said ‘take up your own cross and follow Me.’

  “We’re not called to a life of comfort and ease. We’re supposed to join with Christ in His suffering and death for the world. That’s what you’ve been baptized into. It’s wonderful beyond belief, and more horrible than you can imagine. But Christ is there, in the midst of it, suffering with us, giving us a peace and an inner joy that defies the world and conquers it.”

  “After all,” the priest continued, “who won? The Vikings, or those Christians who were slaughtered all over Europe?”

  John shrugged. “But what good is that kind of victory? What does it mean to say that Christ is with you? You’re still starving, or bleeding, or being eaten by a lion.”

  Fr. Miller paused and looked at John long and hard, as if he was sizing up one of the contestants in a fight. “That’s something you’re going to have to find out for yourself, John. And you’ve got a perfect opportunity right in front of you. Your wife, whom you swore to be with in sickness and health, is out there in Columbus watching her life fall apart in front of her eyes, and her one comfort in the world in sitting in my office feeling sorry for himself. Put aside your petty complaints and go be a servant to her.

  “What has she done to you, after all? She didn’t share a very hard part of her life – a part that she was trying to get past. Is that some great sin against you? And even if it is, is your heart so hard that you can’t forgive her? Ask yourself how Christ would react to a woman in that kind of pain, and you go and do the same.

  “And then,” Fr. Miller said, lightening up a bit and smiling at John, “come back and you can tell me what good it does to have Christ suffering there with you. See if giving really is better than receiving, and if serving is more fulfilling than being served.”

  They were hard words, to be sure, and enough for him to chew on for weeks. So far he wasn’t sure how he would answer Fr. Miller’s challenge. But somehow the anger he had felt at Jillian – the sense of betrayal he’d felt as he read those letters – wasn’t that important to him any more. He felt as if it was still there, on the edge of his consciousness, and that he could tap into it if he chose to, but he had made up his mind to focus on Jillian and her needs. In a way it felt artificial. He knew that he could choose to feel that anger again, and there was a perverse desire that nagged him to give in and give free rein to those feelings.

  Still, he had to admit that the peace he experienced as he comforted Jillian was pleasant. It would be hard to compare the two feelings. If pressed, John wasn’t sure he could say which was better – venting his anger, or being a peacemaker. They were both enjoyable in their own ways, but in very different ways, and that troubled him.

  He didn’t want to think of himself as a person who could enjoy anger and vengeance.

  * * *

  The hotel room had a small table and two chairs next to the bed, but there was precious little room to spare. John tried to set up dinner without waking Jillian, but it was a hopeless task. She groaned and rolled over, and then smiled at the sight of paper plates, plastic utensils and Styrofoam cups set as properly as John could manage around a bunch of red carnations and a couple paper boxes of Chinese food.

  The scene reminded John of a trip they had taken to the beach the previous summer. They let their Chinese food get cold for the sake of other appetites. But John had a feeling there was a barrier between them right now. They needed to talk before their relationship could be physical again.

  Jillian sat up in bed and stretched, groaning and wiping the sleep from her eyes.

  “You’re so wonderful,” she said. “Did you find a decent crispy beef?”

  “We’ll see. I doubt it’s crisp any more. You know how carry-out gets.”

  John tore the lead wrapper off a bottle of white wine and started working on the cork.

  “It’s not chilled. It was a choice between cold, cheap wine, and something half decent.”

  “I’m not above putting ice in my wine,” she said, getting off the bed and wrapping her arms around John’s waist from behind as he finished with the bottle.

  “Thanks for coming out here.” She kissed him on the cheek from behind and they both sat down at the table.

  John tried to ask about Norma, and her trip, and how those last hours were, but Jillian didn’t seem to want to talk about it. He tried to talk about the food, but that didn’t work either. In desperation, he asked about her flight.

  “I was at a party in 12th grade,” she began, confusing him completely. “I went with my boyfriend. We were drinking, and somebody started passing around a joint, and then some pills, and after that it’s pretty much a blur.”

  John didn’t respond.

  “We’d fooled around before, but we’d never had sex. That night was different. I don’t know why I did it, or even if it was a conscious choice, with the drugs and all. But when I woke up, I felt cheap and used, and then three weeks later I was late. Dad was gone then, and mom was in the hospital with cancer. She died before I was even four months along. She never knew. And since I was 18 and Emily was 19, we just took care of ourselves.

  “I worked for a little while at a custom dress shop, and mom’s insurance gave me and Emily enough to pay the mortgage for another year, and when we sold the house it gave us enough to pay for school.

  “Giving Karl up was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” Her eyes began to turn red and te
ary again. “But I knew it was right for him. After that, I just wanted to leave Columbus. And when I got to Maryland, I decided to start a new life. Rule number one was no boyfriends. Rule number two was no boyfriends. Rule number three was no drugs.”

  John looked at this familiar face, this woman he had loved so dearly for the last couple years, and saw a soul that had been deeply wounded, and was only now facing it. He’d never thought of Jillian in that way before. She always seemed to be the tower of emotional strength, the one who knew herself and had everything under control. She was so self-sufficient. So in touch with who she was and what she wanted to be.

  And yet, this story helped explain who she really was. Her insistence on meaning and commitment in the sex act seemed to make more sense now. She knew what it was like to have meaningless sex, and she knew the consequences. “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” he remembered reading somewhere. But more than that, she had taken responsibility for her life and done the best she could.

  John reached across the table and took her hand. He finally understood how wicked it would have been to have taken the other path. If he had chosen to nurse his anger and resentment, he would have taken those old wounds in Jillian’s heart and opened them up again, and in the process he would have ruined the most beautiful part of both of their lives.

  The thief comes only to steal and destroy, he thought. Maybe that was part of the answer to his question. Maybe there are times when suffering is the only way to avoid a greater evil. If he had taken a stand on his wounded dignity and come in with guns blaring, he would have turned a bad situation into a nightmare.

  “You were right to call Ed to check on me,” John said as his own eyes got misty. “You don’t know how close I was to giving up on you.”

  Jillian got up from the table and took him in her arms.

  “I was wrong to hide this from you, John,” she said. “I should have told you.”

  “You were afraid,” he said.

  “But it was wrong, and you had every reason to be angry with me. Can you forgive me?”