“I just got in. The TV was on when I left, honey. And the light. You were awake then.”
“What took you so long? What time is it?” He peered blearily at the bedside clock. When he fell asleep by eight o'clock, time to him became warped. I could feel his
umbrage swell. “I thought you weren't going to be gone long.”
Territory issue again. Oh, God.
“Faith had to do her grocery shopping and a couple of other errands.”
“What kind of errands?”
I took a deep breath. In the darkest of times, during the greatest risks of war, I could not force myself to lie to Dan. “We had to swing by Western Union.”
“What for?” he demanded.
“Lanny, Faith's friend, wired her some money to help her out.”
“Huh.” He sat up on the side of the bed, staring at the wall as though he'd like to take it apart, piece by piece.
“Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” I said gently, hoping against hope that he would settle back down. “I'll turn out the light.”
But he was already up, on his way to the bathroom. I heard a pecking on my window. I rushed over to peer out. It was Faith.
“Your lights are on,” she mouthed silently and pointed to Dan's Land Rover.
I nodded and headed to get the keys in my purse. She met me at the door.
“Here,” she reached for them. “I'll go turn the lights off for you.”
She disappeared to the driveway.
Dan appeared in that moment. “What's Faith doing?” he asked, clearly put out for having been awakened. I didn't blame him, actually.
“She's turning off the car lights.”
Please, let it go, Dan
. I felt it in my bones â disaster loomed.
He was still as death standing there. “With my car keys? You let Faith have my keys?”
“She's just turning out the lights.”
He marched up to me, nearly nose to nose. “Do you realize that I work out of that vehicle? Huh? It's my office. My money pouch is locked in there, for crying out loud. We live in a prison, remember? I have to lock everything up.”
“I know, Dan.” And I did. God help me. I did.
After years of disappointments and betrayals, wrestling with the trust issue had become a knee jerk reaction for Dan. Tonight, awakened out of deep sleep and unsettled, Dan's entire demeanor stiffened in protest at Faith's possession of his keys.
I was able to flow with dilemmas and not overreact. Dan was not.
Dan's perception of life itself was as different from mine as rocks to pudding. But through the years, we'd managed to mesh and delight in those very differences, complementing and finishing out one another.
Until now.
This.
To me, Faith's journey to wholeness flowed like a river, each bend opening up a new view of
place
, leaving the past downstream, now cut off by a burned bridge. I did not go there anymore. Dan did; each time a calamity arose, he rushed back to peer past that burned bridge at the dark waste piles.
For reference
, he said. So he remained on hold. As in
wait and see
if she's really changed.
“After all,” he'd often reminded me gravely, “my father never changed. He died drunk.”
Tonight, I felt I was jerked up by two hungry, contending lions and ripped asunder.
His anger palpable, Dan met Faith at the front door. “Give me those keys,” he muttered in his lethally quiet way and snatched them from her. I watched her ready smile dissolve.
“Okay, Dad.” Faith
knew
â she rushed to explain. “Your lights were on and I turned them off for Mama.” He brushed past her and went outside to the car, to check his money pouch, no doubt. When he returned, he turned his back and climbed the stairs. I heard the guestroom door open and firmly shut behind him.
I stood there for long moments, feeling something vital sinking to my toes, then draining out. It was the sickly desperate feeling that was becoming so familiar to me these days.
Faith came into the kitchen. “Why is he so mean to me, Mama?” she asked sharply. I could hear,
feel
her hurt. “He acts like he hates me. The nicer I am to him, the meaner he talks to me.”
Which was true. Lately, with fatigue and financial stress hammering at him, Dan simply wanted out of the situation. Nothing I said helped. Actually, my comments hurt because Dan felt I was aligning with Faith. That I was no longer his ally.
So now, another component clouded the state of affairs.
Territory.
Who did I belong to? Did my belonging to Dan negate any maternal responsibility to my daughter?
Heaven help me.
Territory.
Space.
No way I turned my view satisfied Dan's need for support.
Nor could I fulfill Faith's need for validation.
“He truly hates me,” Faith now repeated hoarsely. “Doesn't trust me.”
Sickness stirred inside me. Nerves on edge, I turned to go to my bedroom. “I can't do anything about that, Faith.”
“I know. He's a jerk!” she snapped.
I stopped in my tracks. “Please do not diss your father like that, Faith,” I scolded, knowing she lashed out in pain at his rejection. She was, at once, a little girl and a nearly thirty-year-old woman.
And my mother's heart saw the ageless essence of Faith in her hurt. Still, I would not allow her disrespect of my husband, her father, to go unchallenged.
“He does for you constantly. That's the way he shows love. You must respect that.”
“Huh.” She took out a bowl from the cabinet and a carton of Neapolitan ice-cream from the freezer. “Respect? What about him? It goes two ways.”
I could not argue that. “I guess what I'm referring to is honor. Your father deserves honor.”
“Huh.”
She finished scooping a dish of ice-cream to take upstairs, “I've not had my period in three months.” She detoured to stand before me. “Feel my stomach. Does it feel strange to you?” My nerves stretched taut as over-tightened fiddle strings, but I poked around her abdomen and it did feel bloated. “Just swollen. I'm going to lie down, honey.” That was all the compassion I could muster at that precise moment. My nerves lay in a tangled mess, shrieking
no more.
“I know, I know,” she mumbled dispassionately. “You never take me seriously.”
I spun around, squinting in amazement at her. “What?” My head throbbed and my stomach knotted.
Nothing is ever enough.
“Why do you hate me?” she asked dully.
It was like a physical blow. “What are you talking about?” Something primal and livid leaped and spiraled through me. Something beyond any calmness that nestled predominantly in my genes. I took her by the shoulders and said through clenched teeth, “I
do not hate you. But you do aggravate me out of my skull.”
She didn't react with anger as she would have done in the past. Her arms hung limply to her sides. I noted her eyes were glassy now, like deep grieving pools.
I'd had it ⦠but something in those grieving pools tugged at me. Disarmed me. “Look, Faith. You need a good night's sleep and â ”
“That's all I do is sleep,” she said in that same dead tone, as in can't-you-
fix-it?
I knew Faith's woman-to-child attitude could turn on a comma, but it always simultaneously irritated me and evoked mercy. Because I knew inside each adult is a child crying out for help.
That child may be a hellion or a spoiled brat. Or she may be genuinely in need.
It's not always easy to tell. And I wondered why I was created with so much â
feeling. Compassion.
Why did I feel others' pain?
Was it gift or curse?
I went to my room, closed the door and climbed into bed. Finally, after a long time, my eyes drooped and I dozed.
I awoke abruptly to kitchen noises. Glasses clinking, water running, cabinet doors opening and closing.
I peered at my clock. One-fifteen a.m. I climbed shakily from bed and went to the kitchen where Faith moved about as if it were eight a.m. “What are you doing?” I asked sharply.
She looked at me, clueless. “I'm cleaning up the kitchen, Mama.” As in what-does it-look-like-I'm-doing?
“Could you keep the noise down?”
She wilted. “Every time I try to be nice, everybody treats me mean.” She threw up her hands. “I give up.”
My nerves were burning, searing, my head spinning from the abrupt transport from deep slumber to wakeful jumpiness. My mind was in a nightmare vortex. “Please stop this, Faith,” I said, desperately seeking some solidness upon which to land. “Everybody's not a nocturnal creature like you.”
“Stop talking mean to me.” The woman reared her assertive head.
Wham
. My senses slammed against a steel wall and pulsated madly. Quivering, I grabbed my skull, “
I'm not
talking mean to you.”
“You hate me.” The words from the child were quiet. Dead.
Again, desperately, I took her by the shoulders. “Faith,” I said, my voice breaking, “please stop doing this to me.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “This is going to kill me if it doesn't stop.”
And in that moment, I felt mortality. Age was catching up with me. Stress layered like an onion, suffocating and squeezing the life from me.
Fast.
I left the room, sobbing quietly. “Mom?” Faith followed me to my bedroom door. “I'm sorry. I'll stop.” Her woman's voice still had that lackadaisical tone, but I heard an undergirding sincerity. “Get some sleep, Mom.” She gently closed the door.
I climbed into the empty bed and pulled the covers up to my chin, missing Dan's warm bulk and consoling arms. He needed me to be exclusively
his
during this golden season of our lives.
His heart-rending words from yesterday came back to haunt me.
“It's what I've worked for all these years, Deede. We should be free. Comfortable. But we've spent it all on her, just keeping her alive and out of prison.”
He huffed a harsh laugh. “And it still isn't over. I don't see an end in sight. We have an adult, needy daughter who doesn't seem to have any direction or ambition to become self-sufficient.”
His green eyes held anguish. “My life is being stolen. No â
our
life is being stolen.”
He's having one of those anguish moments.
I have them, too, when the need for space nearly suffocates me.
Space.
Tonight, my eyes popped open and I stared through gloam at the ceiling.
Faith was fighting for a foothold to a new beginning. Me? I continued to bury myself in writing. At times, even that failed to divert me from the sick sense of failure. Yes, failure hammered me into a desolate heap. I must have done something wrong for Faith to have veered so far from her potential.
“It's not our fault,” Dan insisted. “She has to decide for herself to rebuild her life. Her decisions got her in the mess she's in. Not ours.”
“I agree. And she is trying, honey. She's her own worst enemy, it's true. But I watch her struggling every day to pull herself up.” I carried the sadness of it all. Oh, how I wanted to understand her.
At the same time, I wanted her to simply bathe daily and have some sort of agenda to keep her functioning rather than vegetating in a messy chamber. But I'd learned long ago that counseling would roll off her like water off tarp.
Tonight, echoes of Dan's impassioned, “Why can't she just keep the porch neat?” struck me like a whip. Such a
little
thing for her to do. Her chaos was so at odds with our neat organizational leanings.
Faith would sweep the ashes on occasion, just enough to keep Dan from verbally throttling her.
And despite the continued stressfulness, Faith
had
come a long way in her recovery journey.
“Three years ago,” I had reminded Dan, “we would have traded our proverbial kingdom for the progress she'd now made in getting drug free.”
“She does it to irritate us,” Dan swore again, ignoring my progress reference. “She knows how we feel.”
Another way to dishonor,
I read his thoughts because I, too, felt her perverseness to the bone. And it hurt.
Tonight, I thought on how hard Dan worked. Fatigue plunged him into deep slumber nearly as soon as his body horizontal-ed. I could close my eyes and see his beautiful calloused hands and his strong male features gentled in sleep and thought how he â even in his resentment
â loved his daughter. He gave her haven even after she'd betrayed him over and over again.
I recalled how he'd given her chance after chance to remedy the seasons of disrespect and self-serving. And I knew he tried to understand the import of my being there for her, to see her through to the finish in her final quest to find a life.
Faith wants to find her space, too. I have to believe that. I'm all she has at this moment. It's not as simple as some folks believe, to toss a child out onto the street when they're trying to pull themselves up by the bootstrings, however feeble their attempts.
And my head spins tonight as I close my eyes and seek slumber.
Why all the turmoil? What's happened
to family?
Where is God in all this?
Nobody in our family clan wants Faith around any longer. Except Jensen, Noni, and Priss â and I sometimes wonder if that will last. I understand. Things disappeared too many times when Faith was there.
But once, long ago, she was innocent.
She can change.
Can't she?
With everything in me, I pray that she can.