CHAPTER 32

MY LEGS TURN TO SAND, and it takes the strength of my husband and my brother to keep me on my feet.

“How . . . ?” But I cannot finish the rest of the sentence, because there are too many questions wrapped within it.

A state of near panic erupts around us, but we stand stalwart in the familiar scene. My new dress begins to collect dust within each seam; my skin absorbs the minuscule pelting of the grains of dirt. Russ hands me his handkerchief, which I immediately place over my nose and mouth, reacting out of habit. He and Greg cover their lower faces with the lapels of their jackets.

“This is unbelievable,” Greg says, unable to muffle the faint amusement in his statement.

“I believe God himself has spoken,” Russ says, his full eyebrows communicating a hidden smile.

Of the three, only I appear horrified at this display. But then, only I know its origin.

Greg tugs at my hand. “We need to wait inside until it blows over.”

I pull back. “No! We have to get home. The kids —”

“They’ve lived through this before,” Russ says, urging me in the direction of my brother. “They know what to do.”

I plant my feet. “They were going to the park! What if it’s worse there? What if they can’t find their way —?” Panic steals the rest of my thought. How easy it would be to become disoriented even in the now-familiar streets. And Ariel has grown so independent, she might refuse to take Ronnie’s hand. Or he might not be able to find her at all. “Take me home!” My voice rises shrill above the wind, streaking through the crowd.

“Wait inside,” Greg says, now nearly shouting just to be heard. “I’ll get the car.”

I give Russ a push. “Go with him.”

“I’m not leaving you alone.”

“I’ll be right here. I’ll be fine. I’ve been through this before, remember?”

Convinced that I’m not going to change my mind, they leave, and I back myself up against the building. True, there would be shelter inside, but I can’t find anything within myself to be deserving of protection. How stupid could I be, thinking that a mere train ride halfway across the country would shield me from God’s wrath?

All around me, the din of the crowd mixes with the whistle of the wind, but certain phrases make their way out of the cloud of conversation. They curse the Okies who couldn’t leave their dirt at home. They claim blindness, and breathlessness, and a weakness to stand against the onslaught of the hazy brown fog. Part of me wants to mock them, because they have no idea what it means to face such a thing on a week’s empty stomach, or after months of feeling and tasting nothing but dry and dirt. The rest of me —the better part, maybe —has an illogical need to apologize. To explain that I know exactly why this is happening, and what I must do to bring it to an end. Because there is no more time, and nowhere to go where I will be out of the reach of God’s judgment. They have suffered for a matter of minutes what I have endured for years. I’ve tried to run away, to hide within the walls of an ordinary house, to do penance by meeting the needs of my family —a home for my children, companionship for my brother, and for Russ, my heart. My love, abundant and consuming, hoping to erase any lingering bits of unfaithfulness. Now, God has scooped up all of those bits, and he’s flung them across the vastness of the country, more powerful than his own clear sky, farther reaching than any man’s train.

I hear my name above the clamor and see Greg’s car pulled to the side, Russ calling to me. Handkerchief in place, I wedge my way through the crowd and to the car, where Russ and Greg are changing places.

“I’ll do better as navigator,” Greg says as I slip into the backseat. “I’ll do the seeing; Russ can do the driving. You do the praying.”

I dive into the backseat, ready to fulfill my duty, though I do so silently. I hardly think at all to pray for our safe passage home, as I trust the abilities of the two men in front of me. Instead, I beg for the safety of my children, that they won’t become victims of my negligence as a mother.

While Greg’s decision to hand the wheel over to Russ was a logical one, driving the nearly deserted roads that spool between a dozen little towns is a far cry from maneuvering alongside a hundred other automobiles, each wanting to occupy your space, and willing to dislodge you to get it.

“Easy, easy,” Greg says, determining the amount of space between each car. “Once we’re out of the city, things should clear up.”

They don’t, and the trip that accounted for little more than an hour’s travel in one direction lasts more than four going the other way. By the time we come into view of Arcadia, I am ready to jump out of the car and start walking the streets, calling for my children on the wind.

But the streets are deserted, looking more and more like home every day.

“We’ve seen worse,” Russ keeps repeating —to reassure himself, I suppose. And he is right. We’ve been in dust storms that built a wall of blindness between the eyes and the end of the nose. This is more like dirty, driven snow. Thick and stinging, but adequately transparent. I keep my eyes peeled for any sign of Ariel and Ronnie, up until the time Russ stops the car in front of the now-familiar door.

All the windows are dark.

I stumble out of the car and run up the walkway, screaming, “Ariel! Ronnie!” I pound on the door and grab the knob, finding it turns easily, but when I try to push it open, it won’t budge.

More pounding, more calling, more pushing, and suddenly it is yanked away from me, and I fall through, tripping over the damp, rolled towel that has been placed along the bottom.

“Just like you taught us,” Ronnie says, and without giving a thought to the fact that I am filthy with dirt and his clothes and person are as clean as they were when I left this morning, I grab him into my arms, telling him over and over that he is a good, good boy.

“Where’s your sister?” Surely if he is here, she will be too.

Ronnie hooks a thumb toward the back of the house. “Watching over the kittens. She doesn’t want them to be scared.” His young brow wrinkles with concern. “Where’s Papa?”

I join him, looking to Greg for an answer.

“In the car. Waiting, he said, to know if he had to go back out to search.”

“I’ll tell him,” I say, beating Ronnie to the offer.

Once at the car, instead of knocking on the window and beckoning him into the house, I open the door and slide inside. Russ turns to me with a worried expression. “They’re gone?”

“They’re fine.” I should touch him, not knowing how many other opportunities I will have to do so, but I keep my hands in my lap. “They’re inside.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

I don’t have to hold him back to keep him still. An instinct that comes with so many years of shared loss bids him to stay in his seat and look at me. He always seemed to know even before my body made its final decision to rid itself of a child. He said a final farewell the breath before my father’s last. The fact that he has no perception of my adultery comes from the fact that, until this moment, it posed no threat to our marriage, because I would have lied to deny its existence. But I could not lie about my lost babies, and I could not deny the death of my father, and now my marriage dangles over the same precipice.

“I have to tell you.” I look at him, drinking him in like cool water. “I did this.”

“Did what?”

“This —the storm. I brought it here.”

His laughter is a weapon to ward off the fear that is building itself up between us. “What can that possibly mean?”

“I thought I could get away. Run away from it. That if I confessed —repented, like the Bible says. Like God says, and be washed white as snow. And as far as the east is from the west. But the west. It’s here. It’s followed me. And I’ll never be clean. I’ll never —”

I’ve disintegrated into nothing more than a twist of tears and disjointed phrases. Any other time, Russ would have taken me into his arms, soothed me until my sentences ran straight. Now, though, he keeps a distance between us. Were I to melt, he would not cup his hands to catch me. For the first time in memory, I am utterly alone in his presence, and the storm becomes an unexpected ally. Here, in this place of safety, rocked by the wind, serenaded by the dust, I take a deep, cleansing breath, and relive it all.

“That first night, when he came into our house . . .”

“Who?”

I look at my husband through scales of shame. “Jim.” After that, I spare neither of us any detail that could rise up again like some secret, treasured memory. I tell him about our afternoons, both of us reading from a single book, our sentences falling upon one another’s as we whiled away the afternoons while Ariel napped upstairs. I do, however, refrain from elaboration. That first kiss in the kitchen the day we brought Barney home is relegated to “a kiss,” interchangeable with a dry touch to a deacon’s cheek.

Russ listens. Never interrupting, never interpreting, not even muttering the slightest sound of understanding. He becomes something that I’ve never seen in him before —utterly passive. Disconnected, almost. Always, always, his face has displayed a map of his mind, sketching his thoughts before he speaks his words. Sometimes instead of his words. But I find myself talking to a death mask, Russ captured in his handsome perfection. Set for eternity, and unmoved. Until I come to the day I disappeared, and at this point I would give anything for expressionless banality. Instead, something dreadful flickers across his features. Recognition. Confirmation.

“I’ve always wondered,” he says, more musing than accusatory.

“What do you mean you always wondered?” Even now, knee-deep in confession, I leap to my own defense.

“You were so . . . altered. And then so sick, and what with the things Mrs. Brown said —”

“You never said a word!”

“Neither did you.”

“But if you had —if you’d confronted me . . .”

“I did. At the hospital. Don’t you remember?”

“I mean, specifically. If you had asked —”

“You would have told me?”

“You would have spared me.”

This takes him aback, and while he hasn’t altered his posture a mite since I got in the car, he now rears back as if to escape.

“Spared you?” And then a laugh so bitter it freezes my blood. “Spared you? Darling, have you been listening to yourself? From what did you need to be spared?”

I can’t look at him. Until this point, my gaze has traced a path from the brown window to my dirt-encrusted hands and his masklike face. But for what I have to say next, there is no place safe. Looking outside gives the illusion of being buried, my hands bear traces of Jim’s touch, and I do not deserve even the image of my husband.

I close my eyes and return to the darkness that haunts me. “I needed to be spared from being alone. I needed to be spared from what happened next.”

Christmas, and the New Year, and the three wretched mornings that followed.

“My God,” he says, crying out to the Lord who watches me from behind the storm.

“Do you think —? Can you ever forgive me?”

He says nothing, only presses his fingers to his eyes as if trying to gouge out the images planted there.

“I’ve asked God to forgive me, but that’s not enough. Not for me, anyway.”

He looks at me, transformed. Monstrous, all of his nobility dropped away. The landscape of his face stripped of all that ever gave it life. “Why are you telling me now?”

“Because you’re my husband, and I’ve —I’ve sinned. Against God, and against you.”

“I mean, why now?”

“Because I have to. I was wanting to protect you from all of this. I wanted to carry it all on my own. Believe me.” For the first time I touch him, grabbing at the sleeve of his jacket, feeling the layer of dirt beneath my hand. “You always told me I was strong —”

He snatches his arm away. “Do not use my words against me.”

His admonition stings. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I’ve told you everything. I promise.”

“No, tell me the truth about why you’ve held this in up to now.”

“I wanted to spare —”

“That’s not it.”

“I thought I was strong —”

“No.”

And then, like a wellspring, truth floods me, bubbling out with my very pulse, and flows from my tongue. “I was ashamed. I hated myself, and I never, ever wanted you to see me in that light. So I hid it, buried it deep. Some days —” tears well in my eyes at the confession to come —“I’d even forget. I might go all day long and not even give a thought to what I’d done. That’s how far I tried to fling it away. But then, something would happen, or there’d be a quiet moment, when I was alone, or with you, and it would come back. That’s what made me think —made me wonder —if God maybe hadn’t forgiven me. Because it kept coming back. And I thought, if we came here, away from where it happened —away from him —I could hide that part of me away. Leave it in Oklahoma. But it came back.”

The sobs that racked my body have now subsided, only catching every other breath or so, irregular in how they break through the silence that has dropped between us. I can hear each individual grain of dust as it hits the car’s window, and I’m sure the others must think we’re some kind of crazy not to come inside. But this needs to be us —cocooned alone. Maybe not exactly alone, as the invisible presence of Jim Brace lurks between us, but we started our marriage with a conversation much like this one. Me and Russ, under the moonlight in his old jalopy of a car, parked in a wheat field. We had a third presence with us then, too. Invisible, but real —our baby, and my weeping apology. My shame, my burden, until Russ lived out his promise to carry it with me.

I’ve no right to expect the same now. And yet I see him, broken, but girding up before my very eyes. Filling this small space, his presence wrapping itself around me, creating a wall strong enough to withstand the storm, leaving room enough for grace.

“He has forgiven you.” He says it as a fact proven thus far only to him.

“How do you know?”

“Because I have to have faith in his mercy. It’s what I know to be true, that sins confessed are forgiven. And if I can’t believe that he has forgiven you after your sincere confession, what hope can I have that I myself will be forgiven?”

I have no answer. I never do, so I keep silent for a few more shuddering breaths, staring at the tear in my new stockings.

“You must hate me.”

“I could never hate you.” Which gives me little comfort, as I know it’s not his nature to hate anyone, and he takes time to gather the rest of his response. “I love you. Believe it or not, as much now as I ever have at any moment. Nothing can change that. The love is still there —I just feel a little bit disconnected from it.”

I look up to see the pain behind the words, and before I can stop myself, I think of Jim, what he said about his wound, the greatest pain being the strain on the connecting flesh before his arm was severed. Our marriage is that flesh, and I alone have wounded it. Only the grace of God and my husband’s love can heal it.

“I know how much I’ve hurt you, Russ.”

“You couldn’t possibly know.”

“If I could take it on —not even trade, but take yours on top of mine, I would.”

He touches me for the first time since I entered the car. Lightly, the backs of his fingers graze my cheek, more condescension than caress. “I wouldn’t let you, Nola, darling. You’re not strong enough. It would kill you.”

“But it won’t kill you?”

“It has, a bit.”

And there, right before my eyes, a part of him is irreplaceably gone. Severed. I know what it feels like to die. Not to be dead, but to be in the process. Little by little. But I’ve been dying for my own sin. Russ is paying a much higher price.

I clasp his hand to me, bury a kiss in his palm. “So you believe, do you? That God forgives me?”

“He does, of course.”

A beat of silence before I’ll let him go. “And you?”

“I will.”

And since he’s never failed me, my hope is in that promise.