Lay It on My Heart (19 page)

“
Tinkering
's probably the wrong word. I just mean that studying your father might help other people like him.”

“What do you mean, ‘like him'?” I say. “There isn't anybody else like him. Every person is one of a kind.” I can hear myself breathing now, each breath bigger and more frantic, fighting its way through my shrinking throat. I am either going to cry or pass out or burst through my skin.

Mrs. Catterson scoots to the edge of the bed and plants her feet on the floor.

“My father is a man after God's own heart,” I say, and when I look up, Mrs. Catterson is nodding.

“Honey,” she says. “Honey, of course. I didn't mean to upset you.” She stands up in front of my chair and reaches her arms out like she wants to hug me, but I am not going to stand up. I can still feel the envelope under me, and whatever's in it, no matter what, is going to be mine. She has to stoop over to hug me, and when she's done I stay very still while she leaves the room and pulls the door almost but not completely shut behind her. I listen to the shoe-socks on the stairs, whose creaking is a sound so familiar that I would not have even noticed it before we moved out. Then I hear another sound I would not have said I cared about, that of the traffic at the intersection of Main Street and East, the steady slowing down and speeding up of engines at the two-way stop. At the edge of a black hole, time slows down. And if you could make it through a black hole to the other side, which you can't, time might even reverse, and if I could make time reverse I'd go back and stay right here in my room, knowing that Phoebe and my father are somewhere else in the house doing whatever it was they used to do that I didn't pay enough attention to. Phoebe rolling her clean pantyhose into balls, maybe, or my father staying up all night, walking the streets of East Winder, receiving prophecy, and then coming home to record it for
The Good Word
. I want this so badly that I understand how they came up with the term
homesick
, though I don't know if anyone has ever felt that way sitting in a room that is still, technically, her own. In social studies last year we studied immigrants, how in Europe during the war countries invaded other countries and took them over, with the invaders living in people's houses and driving their cars and, our teacher said, much worse, with a look on her face that could only mean she was talking about rape, which Phoebe says is the worst possible thing that can happen to a woman. I always thought the people in the invaded countries would feel mostly anger about how unfair it was, and vengeful, especially if they had been raped. But what I never imagined is how sad they might feel. I would not have said that sadness could keep you sitting motionless in a chair, in a room that used to be yours, listening to things that you didn't even know you missed. Things you wouldn't have even said were yours to hear until after you discovered that they are not necessarily yours at all.

Even though it's only five o'clock when Seth gets back from practicing with Dr. Osborne, it's nearly dark from a rainstorm. Through a crack in the bed-sheet curtain, I see the electric cross on the water tower flicker on, and I have missed that too. My rear end is numb from sitting. I lift the top off my box again, with all the things in there that mean nothing to anyone but me, and I deposit the manila envelope inside. I don't even try to cover it with anything else. I just close the lid, drag the chair back to Seth's desk, and head downstairs.

“What were you doing up there?” Seth asks when I enter the kitchen. He's already seated at the table, Mrs. Catterson pouring him a glass of juice, like he's a little kid.

I hold up the box. “Just taking back something that was already mine.”

“You better not have touched my stuff.”

“Seth,” says Mrs. Catterson.

“I saw your trumpet,” I say, “but I didn't touch it. I don't even know how to play.” When Mrs. Catterson ducks into the pantry, I whisper, “Your stuff smells bad.”

“It does not.”

“Does not what?” says Mrs. Catterson, shuffling back into the room in her shoe-socks.

“Why did you let her into my room?”

“Why am I getting sass?” says Mrs. Catterson. “Is that what you'd like me to discuss with your father when he gets back?”

“Thank you for letting me spend time in your room,” I say to Seth in my nicest voice.

Across the table, my table, he glowers at me. I think about the fact that I might be the closest thing to a friend he has, this boy who spends the whole day here alone with his mother, doing homeschool things and waiting for his father to get back from fundraising trips. But knowing I should feel bad for him makes me, at this moment, hate him even more.

“How about a ‘You're welcome, Charmaine,'” says Mrs. Catterson.

“You're welcome,” Seth mumbles, but whispers, “not welcome, not welcome, not welcome,” when Mrs. Catterson slips out again.

 

Phoebe picks me up in the Pinto, which is repaired for now but coughing blue smoke. When she slows down to shift gears, as she always does, we stall in the middle of Main Street. Once she gets the engine going again, she tells me she's been thinking hard about our visit to the recovery center together, how good it is that I'm getting the chance to see the situation for myself. “I really can't shield you any longer from what your father's going through,” she says.

There's this thing that happens with her voice, like she can't help being pleased to have something important to say. Even if the important thing is something bad for everyone.

“I know what he's going through,” I say, and then there's the thing in my voice that responds to the thing in hers. That makes her say things like: “Right; there isn't much you don't know these days, is there?”

The lit-up cross still shows in the passenger-side mirror, smaller and smaller in the distance, and I focus on it while I roll down the window. The air smells like wet leaves.

“Must you?” Phoebe says.

I don't answer and she sighs, then rolls down her window too. The air has a chill for this early in September, and soon I am cold, but I won't roll my window back up because that would be admitting I shouldn't have rolled it down in the first place. I wrap my arms over my chest, careful not to wince in front of her.

“Had enough?” Phoebe says, rolling up her window. “Colder than you thought, isn't it?”

“It feels great,” I say, and lean my head out into the air.

“You're going to make yourself sick,” Phoebe says, and we ride in silence for more than a mile. Then she knocks her elbow into mine and says, “Hey.”

“What?”

“Remember how I used to come into your bedroom and tickle you at night? Remember how you and I used to be best friends?”

I tuck my elbow into me as close as I can. We're approaching the gas station Tracy Payne lives behind. It's still open, and tonight there's a truck at the pump that hides most of the cinder-block house in back. I like that Phoebe doesn't know I've been over to Tracy's. I like that she has no idea about any of the three county people God laid on my heart for Operation Outreach. That she doesn't even know there is such a thing.

“I know your father's written to you about not hearing the voice of God,” Phoebe says.

The rain has picked up and I am getting wet, but I don't want to be sealed up in the car with Phoebe, snaking down to the river at twenty miles per hour, when she's talking about my father.

“You want to know what I want to know?” She hits the steering wheel with the heels of both hands, then grabs it hard. “What I want to know is, when is it my time to question something? When do I get to say, ‘The voice of God told me to do this,' or ‘The voice of God told me to do that'? When do I get a break from my responsibilities to figure out what's the voice of God and what's a chemical imbalance in my brain?”

“What's stopping you?”

“What's stopping me?” She sighs. She's been slumping and now she draws herself up, braces herself against the wheel. “I don't like the spirit of your question. Your attitude. But the question in itself isn't a bad one. But even taking myself out of the whole equation . . . let's just say, for example, that I don't get to wonder the same things your father does. That I, as the Apostle Paul himself suggests, have been put on this earth just to listen to and believe anything my husband, your father, as the head of this household, says about God. Are we really supposed to overhaul our lives again and again based on communication no one else is privy to and for no other reason I am given to understand?”

It gives me a bad feeling to hear Phoebe talk this way. “God told Abraham to kill Isaac,” I say. “Abraham was just supposed to obey. He didn't have to understand.”

Our headlights catch the edge of the short gravel drive to the cabin, and we turn in. “You forgot to leave the light on,” Phoebe says. “Again.” She cuts the engine and I roll up the window. “Hold on a sec,” she says. It's dark enough down here that you can't really see the rain, but you can hear it murmuring against the windshield.

“Honestly, Charmaine, I try. I don't hear the voice of God directly, but I read the Bible. I pray. I don't usually insist on understanding. At times I have even allowed myself to feel special, like maybe God chose me to be with a person who hears the voice of God because I had some rare capacity, even a spiritual gift, to accept mysteries—like Mary, when she found out she was pregnant. I liked that God told your father to marry me. I felt important when God gave your father revelations. And then the fasting starts up. And I don't know what to make of it, but your father's an exceptional man, ‘a man after God's own heart,' as your grandmother likes to say. And whatever else may be wrong with him, I believe he's sincere. And if God tells him to fast, who am I to say he shouldn't? And he gives me the history of fasting and all the cultures that fast, and each time he goes off on a fast, I pray for strength. Because he always comes back with who-knows-what new idea. And I have done my level best to help this man run his life—and ours—by a voice he admits he can't hear anymore now that they've slowed down his brain to what the doctors all agree is a normal pace. So what was he hearing all those years his brain was racing? Like someone whispering in his ear, he used to say. That's what I'd like to know. Because other people, other Christian people I could name, thought it was pretty strange for God to tell someone with a family to quit an honest paycheck. What if we'd had an emergency? What if you'd contracted leukemia?”

“I didn't, though,” I say.

“And the things he tells you. Hearing the voice of God, not hearing the voice of God. There are some things you simply should not share with children.”

“You share a lot,” I say. “You share and share and share.”

“Oh, you think so?” She reaches up and turns the rearview mirror to her face. “There's plenty I keep to myself these days. You might be surprised.” Something about the way she moves her chin to the side and blinks at her dim reflection, like she's keeping a secret with it, is new, and my heart lodges somewhere in my neck, thumping hard.

“About Doctor Osborne?” I say.

She adjusts the mirror to its original position, frowning. The darkness is lighter now, greenish, and there's a moving shadow of the rain on Phoebe's face. The drops hit the windshield, stick, and spread out a little, more like big dollops of pudding than like water. You can just barely see the shape each one makes when it hits the glass, before it disappears into the rest of the wetness. When she finally speaks she sounds less shocked and outraged than I expected.

“Morris, Doctor Osborne, is a brother in Christ, and there's nothing wrong with a little support from a brother in Christ.”

“What about support from brothers in Christ who aren't bachelors?” I say. “What about sisters in Christ?”

“Bachelors,” she says. “That sounds just like Daze. Doctor Osborne is a very brilliant man, Charmaine, with a Ph.D. Do you know what that is? We talked when he drove us home, and there is nothing in the world to hide about it. Doctor Osborne is a man of God, and I am a woman of God.”

“A defensive woman of God,” I say.

“That mouth of yours will get you into trouble.”

I try to imagine Mrs. Catterson and Seth talking to each other this way, even when they're mad. The loneliest thing about it is that there's no way out, once it starts. I have to say the next mean thing or I feel like I will disappear.

The rain is letting up, and I reach for the door handle.

“I'm not finished with you,” Phoebe says.

I try to let everything drain out of my face the way Kelly-Lynn does, all the irritation and bad attitude, but it's hard. The irritation and bad attitude keep me from feeling scared, and it's a fight to keep a bland, bored expression. It's like I'm in water, and underneath are all the feelings, like bars of soap that want to bob up and break the surface. Only there are hundreds of them, and I only have two hands.

“What's the matter with your face?” Phoebe says.

I blink at her and count the blinks: one, two, three. I tell myself that each of her words is like a single bird in a migrating flock that will soon be gone.

“You want to know what Doctor Osborne and I talked about? We talked about how there's more than one way to look at things. You can look at things like in biblical times, where God speaks to people right in their heads and tells them to do things like part the Red Sea or build an ark or slaughter their own children. Or live on faith alone. Or maybe—and yes, Doctor Osborne suggested this to me, so what?—maybe you can take the idea that God gave us the Bible for rules and our brains to figure out how to use the rules.”

“Okay,” I say, “but God gives everyone brains. What happens when one person figures something out one way and another person figures the same thing out another way? How do you know who's right if they're both using their God-given brains?”