Proof Through the Night

by Lt. Colonel Toby Quirk

  Sandy said, “Return to a stronghold, you prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore double to you. That’s from Zechariah I think.”

  “What?” said Henry. He meticulously folded his underwear into his duffle bag.

  “I don’t know,” said Sandy. “Just a scripture verse popped into my head. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you whenever.”

  Henry could sense Sandy’s anxiety. She lay on her side with her face to the wall. He knew she was listening to his constant rustling of clothing, opening and closing drawers, his footsteps on the floor, the zipper of his duffle bags opening and closing, and the clack of his clipboard on the dresser every time he checked off an item on his packing list. Just last year as they were preparing for a trip to the Cape, she shouted at him, “Just cram the stuff in the bag and get out of here. What you forget we can just buy when we get there!”

  Henry finished wrapping his extra running shoes in separate towels and tucking them in their proper places in the duffle. He checked each item off his list on his clipboard as he packed it. When he was done he put the clipboard in the bag, zipped it up, and locked the zipper tabs together with a padlock.

  Henry was at the threshold of their bedroom. He wondered if Sandy could sense the possibility that he was leaving for good.

  She said, “I can live without you, you know.”

  “We’ll see.” Henry left.

  Sandy lay awake all night and watched the sun slowly tease the morning darkness with hints of light. Then like a fireball bobbing up out of the water the sun popped up over the horizon, orange-red and angry. Paralyzed under the weight of the vacancy in her bedroom, Sandy wondered how she could function without Henry loving her and annoying her.

  In the thirty years that she knew Henry—two dating and twenty-eight married—she could remember only a few really happy ones. Like their first year.

  Sandy had just come home from a year of rehabilitation feeling almost human when she saw the lanky fisherman sitting in Candee’s Kitchen reading the Boston Herald. Of all the papers he could have chosen, why, she wondered, would anyone read that brainless propaganda rag? And he looked ridiculous in his cutoff blue jeans, rubber boots, and ragged sweatshirt. His shapeless, light-brown hair lay every which way.

  Weeks later, in her therapy session, she asked Dr. Dorothy Hanson, “What unfathomable notion caused me to have any interest in ‘Herald Reader’?”

  “What emotions did you feel when you encountered this man?” Dr. Hanson asked her.

  “Oh, boy, here we go again,” Sandy tried to seem upbeat. “Where’s that list again? You know I can never pinpoint the name of any of my feelings.”

  Even the simple motion—reaching her long arm across the desk, extending her wrist, and holding open her fingers to receive the sheet of paper from Doctor Hanson—attested to Sandy’s natural grace. Sandy sat back in the leather wingback chair, crossed her long legs, and studied the list of feelings.

  “Picture in your mind what you were doing when you noticed him. How many times have you seen this ‘Herald Reader’?” Dorothy Hanson couldn’t help grinning at the name Sandy had given the object of her favorite client’s current obsession.

  “I guess three or four. Every Saturday lately when I go to Candee’s to pick up breakfast for my Nonina, he’s sitting there at the same table by himself reading that vile excuse for a newspaper and eating this huge pile of breakfast. He never looks up. I think he’s tall because his rubber boots stick way out from under the table.”

  “Okay,” the matronly doctor said, “so, keep that scene in mind and scan over the list of feelings there.” And she waited. Silence here was their friend.

  Sandy’s mind percolated. She focused on the visual scene that her memory provided. She’s standing at the counter, waiting for her order. The tables in the dining area bustled with breakfast customers. She looks casually at the crowd and at the far end of the room, with his back to the knotty pine wall, sits this man about her age, all neck, elbows, and legs topped with a bush of scraggly light-brown hair.

  “‘Intrigued,’” Sandy pointed to a word, “‘tense,’ and maybe ‘drawn.’ Is that an emotion?”

  “For you, Sandy, that’s pretty good,” said Dorothy. “Intrigued, tense, and drawn.”

  “Yeah. Maybe drawn,” Sandy clarified. “I don’t know.” And she looked down at her long knuckly fingers.

  “What?” asked the therapist.

  “You know exactly what. As soon as I go there I have to confront all my baggage. I’d just as soon avoid the ‘feelings stuff’ and stay away from that pain we’ve been talking about for the last year.”

  Dorothy waited, just looking at Sandy for a few minutes.

  Sandy continued, “You know, I guess I’m not quite as crazy as I was when it happened, but it’s still there. Is it always going to be there?”

  “It’s part of you, Sandy. Whenever a person experiences as much violence as you have, especially when it involves people they are close to, they respond with crazy behaviors. You, my dear, reacted to the deaths of your parents in a way that most healthy people would react. And the fact that you sought help and now are getting better is all very positive.”

  “I’m going to run it by you one more time just to see if I can, okay?”

  “Sure. And let me remind you, try to tell me how you felt, not just what you experienced.”

  One more time Sandy verbalize the events that brought her to the edge. Her mother’s slow painful battle with stomach cancer. How, as a teenager, she witnessed the pain, the cries, moans, and screams. And that day when Sandy skipped school to help the home health aide give her mother a bath, how she stayed in her bedroom just staring at the ceiling, after the physically and emotionally draining work with her mother. How she heard her father’s pickup truck pull into the driveway. How she heard his footsteps across the dining room into the spare room that had become her mother’s bedroom. How she heard the two sentences her father spoke.

  Sandy looked into Dr. Hanson’s eyes for a long moment, pushing herself to dig out the words that were stuck in her head. The words she had never said out loud before. She felt the tears pooling in her eyes and she hated them. “I’m going to do this, Dorothy,” she said.

  The doctor just nodded and waited.

  “At my mother’s bedside, my father said, ‘You have ruined my life with all your suffering. Deal with this.’ Then the gunshot and the thump of his body on the floor. The smell of the gun smoke and medicine in the room when I ran in there. And the screams—mine and my mother’s.”

  Dorothy rose from her chair and put her arms around Sandy.

  “We’ll get back to this intriguing young man later, okay?”

  The Saturday after that session, Sandy stood again at the takeout counter at Candee’s Kitchen waiting for her breakfast order. She found herself candidly staring at ‘Herald.’

  Candee had to wake her up out of her trance, “Hey, Sandy girl. Your food.”

  “Oh, thanks, Candee. I was thinking of something, kinda zoned out there,” said Sandy vaguely.

  “No. You were staring at Henry,” Candee said, smiling.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Sandy.

  “You wanna meet the guy?” Candee offered.

  “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t be silly. Here.” Sandy gave Candee the ten-dollar bill that covered the meals and the tip. Candee pretended to figure out the change as she did every Saturday and Sandy waved toward the tip jar and walked across the street to her car.

  The next Saturday, Sandy stood again at the takeout counter. Henry sat right there on the bench, smiling at her.

  “Hi,” Sandy said. “Seen you around here. You a fisherman?”

  “Yep.”

  Sandy said, “I suppose Candee made some kind of remark to you about me, didn’t she?”

  “I suppose,” Henry replied.

  “Well, she’s wrong. I wasn’t looking at you. I never even noticed you.”

  “I noticed you,” he said.<
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  Neither of them knew what to say or do next. He watched her receive her order, pay Candee, and turn toward him.

  Candee leaned out of her window and said, “Henry, ask her if she wants to go for a boat ride.”

  “You wanna go for a boat ride?”

  “I have to bring this breakfast home for my grandmother,” Sandy said.

  “I didn’t mean right now,” Henry said, smiling.

  “I didn’t mean right now either,” Sandy said.

  Candee interrupted, “Hey, you two get out of the window. I got other customers, you know.”

  Sandy and Henry turned to the line of people behind them. None of them seemed the least bit bothered at having to wait as they watched the live comedy unfold in front of them.

  So began that first happy year, neither of them allowing the veneer covering their true selves to crack. Sandy kept her depression hidden and Henry did the same with his fits of rage. But the deception couldn’t last forever.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sandy heard Gabriella’s quick, assertive steps on the stairs. Sandy tried to move, but she could not. The wiry little woman appeared in the doorway and she stepped over to Sandy’s bedside and set two cups on the marble surface of the night table. She sat on the edge of the bed and placed her hand on Sandy’s face.

  “I made us some cappuccino. Here.”

  Sandy opened her eyes, tried to focus.

  “You have to sit up, dear girl.” Gabriella stood up from the edge of the bed. Sandy lifted her heavy legs over the edge and sat slumping.

  “Apparently, Sandy, you have been promoted,” Gabriella said.

  Sandy’s nightgown slipped off her shoulder. “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

  POP! Sandy’s cheek stung. Gabriella’s tiny palm flashed from her side to Sandy’s unsuspecting face and back down to her dress in less than a second.

  Sandy fingered her stinging cheek. Tears welled up in her eyes. “What was that for?”

  “That, my dear, was for two things: to curb your disrespectful tone toward me, and to wake you up out of your self-pity. Now have some of this coffee. I sprinkled cinnamon on the foam the way you like it.”

  Sandy struggled through her resentment. She wiped the tears from each eye with her thumb. The hot cappuccino roused her from her funk. She glared at her Nonina over the rim of the cup.

  “With all due respect,” Sandy said, disrespectfully, “my dear Nonina, what in the name of God are you talking about?”

  Gabriella smiled. “Welcome back to the land of the living, dear girl. Our Lord and Commander does not dispatch a squad of angels to guard just anyone.”

  Sandy sipped deep the warm coffee. The caffeine began to arouse her fuzzy brain. “Please elaborate, Nonina.”

  “You have five angel warriors surrounding you at all times. Eventually you will be able to give them commands, and they will comply as long as your orders are in line with God’s mission. Carlos has the gift of communicating with them, too. And Lucille.”

  Sandy pondered that one. She stood. The hem of her gown unfolded over her knees. She took several deep breaths and forced her eyes wide open.

  “You know, Nonina, there’s no end to the absurdities that surround you. So let me get this straight: Carlos can see, hear, and talk to the angels. That’s within my range. That the wolfhound can do the same is just a touch beyond me.”

  “I have to agree with you. But long ago, I have managed to avoid trying to fit the absurdities of the divine realm into the limits of my own understanding. Being able to ‘see’ things that are outside our natural vision expands our universe, don’t you think?”

  “I have to shower and get dressed. I’ll be down for breakfast in a few minutes. I suppose you know about Henry, right?”

  “Yes. I had young Beto accompany him,” said Gabriella.

  Sandy turned around to face her grandmother. “What do you mean you had Beto accompany him? You knew he was going to leave me?”

  “No, dear, and watch that tone. Henry left under what he thinks is his own accord, in one of his fits of rage. Weeks ago I instructed Beto, one of Carlos’s nephews, I believe—I can’t keep that family straight; there are so many of them—to keep an eye on Henry. I told him if he sees Henry preparing to go off on one of his escapades, to catch him and go with him.”

  “I hate that man,” stated Sandy. “He’s abandoned us. This threat to our security from the Directorate must be getting more imminent. How selfish can a man be?”

  “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps,” said Gabriella.

  “What?” said Sandy from the bathroom. “I know it’s a proverb, but what does it have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  No answer from Gabriella.

  Sandy thought about it while she tested the temperature of the water in the shower. “You mean Henry’s tantrum and his leaving us when we need him here more than ever is what God wants him to do? That makes no sense.”

  Gabriella shook her head as she walked down the stairs with the two empty cups in her hands. Out loud she said to herself, “When it makes no sense, that’s when it makes sense.”

  Loud from the bathroom Sandy called, “Can these angels see me in here?”

  “You know where you want to hang out, Henry?” asked young Beto as they sped north up the Atlantic coast on Interstate 95.

  “Not sure, Beto. I want to find a good fishing spot.”

  “I have an idea, Henry,” he said.

  “I’m open, Beto. What’d you have in mind?” Henry leaned back into the Chevy Tahoe’s leather seat.

  “I have a cousin. Has a nice fishing boat up in Maine. He’s recovering from knee surgery, so he’s laid up. I’m sure he’ll let us use his boat.”

  “You guys have cousins all over the place, don’t you? So where is this cousin and more important, where is his boat?”

  “Cape Neddick Harbor. He has a private slip up the Neddick River about a half mile from the ocean.”

  “Sounds good to me. You know how to get there?”

  “Sure, stay on ninety-five until we get into Maine,” said Beto. “So you haven’t really planned out this trip, huh? Not like you, Henry”

  “I had to get out of there.”

  “I hear you,” said Beto. “Sometimes those ladies come up with some crazy stuff.”

  They crossed the state line into New Hampshire and Beto read the sign out loud, “Welcome to New Hampshire, ‘Live Free or Die.’ What’s that supposed to mean anyway?”

  Henry considered the state motto of New Hampshire. “Yeah, that’s a good question. ‘Live free or die,’ like in New Hampshire those are the only two options. No wiggle room in the middle. I wonder how it’s supposed to play out.

  “Hey, you don’t mind we take exit two into Hampton?” Beto said. “They got a Chic-fil-A place there. Just opened up. Best chicken.”

  “Sounds good, Beto,” said Henry. The rhythm of the tires on the highway lent a soundtrack to his thoughts.

  After a few miles of ruminating he said, “I mean who is making the statement, anyway?”

  “Huh?” asked Beto, “What statement you talking about?”

  “The ‘live free or die’ statement. “Is it like someone in New Hampshire is giving an order to someone, or is it like me making some kind of proclamation about my own belief?”

  Beto looked over at Henry behind the wheel. “I think you might be overthinking it, Henry. It’s just a motto, like a historical thing.”

  “So why keep it? I mean it’s on all their license plates, and there it was in our face as we crossed the state line. Stay with me on this, will ya?”

  “Sure, okay,” said Beto, “Let’s say New Hampshire has this freedom police, right? And they go around to every new resident and command them, ‘Hey, you: live free or die.’ So the guy says, ‘I’m living free, I promise. See how free I am?’ And then the police guy says, ‘What if your wife tells you to do something you don’t want to do?’ And the
new resident says, ‘Well, sometimes I go along with her I suppose.’ And the police guy says, ‘You call that freedom? Off with your head.’”

  Henry picked up on Beto’s scenario. “Yeah, see? No alternatives, just freedom or death here in New Hampshire. Another guy drives into the state from Massachusetts with his wife, mother-in-law, and his daughter in the car. At the toll booth the attendant goes, ‘Live free or die?’ The motorist looks at the three females in his car, what’s he going to say? ‘You call this freedom? Just kill me!’” And the men laughed.

  Henry’s face turned serious. “See, Beto, welcome to my world at Cielavista. I’m a planner, an organizer, a control freak, I admit it. And with Gabriella and Sandy all these spiritual mysteries and secret plots sail around the place and you never know what to expect. Too many surprises. I can’t breathe.”

  Henry eased to Tahoe down the off ramp on exit two onto Route 101.

  “I mean what’s wrong with living a normal day-to-day life where you know pretty much what’s going to happen next and you’re prepared to deal with it? At our place it seems the sky is full of supernatural electricity and you never know when you’re going to get struck by divine lightning,”

  Henry guided the big Tahoe into the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A. “You want to eat in or go through the drive through?”

  “If you don’t mind I’d rather eat in. I like to concentrate on my food when I’m eating it,” Beto said. “How long have you been living at Cielavista?”

  “Let’s see…we got married in 1987.” Henry opened the driver’s door and slid off his seat onto the asphalt parking lot. “So that’s what…twenty-eight years now?”

  Henry removed the floor mat from underneath the dashboard and swept it off over the pavement with his hand. He went around the vehicle and swept off Beto’s floor mat. Then he locked the SUV and walked into the restaurant.

  “You do that all the time, Henry?” Beto said.

  “What?”

  “With the floor mats in the car? Wipe them off?”

  “Oh, did I do that?” said Henry.