39

My name blared over the intercom. I sighed and kicked the bedcovers off my stocking feet. It was too early for medication, so it meant someone was here to see me. Probably Mom, who had visited every day since my arrival at the psychiatric facility more than two weeks ago. I pulled on my jeans and threw a sweater over my T-shirt.

I came around the corner and stopped short in front of the reception desk. Jack Slater stood, head bent, speaking to the woman behind the desk. He hadn’t seen me yet. He signed the visitor sheet and handed it back.

If I turned and hustled back to my room, he wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t know I’d been there. Then he would leave and I would tell them I hadn’t heard the page, was in the shower, something. Jack looked up and gave a flat smile, the kind where you arrange your lips in the posture of a smile when you know it isn’t appropriate to be happy.

I pushed my greasy hair away from my face, wishing I actually had taken a shower. I pulled at my loose-knit clothes and shuffled up to the desk. He reached for my hand, squeezed it, and let go, his hand warm and familiar. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. And he simply watched, unhurried.

Finally I said, “Want to walk the grounds?”

“Sounds good.”

We waited for a nurse to buzz us through the locked door. When it clicked open, I pushed the door hard and ran to the middle of the patio, as if they might change their mind and pull me back inside.

Jack called, “Wait for me.” He smiled.

We walked across the stone patio, down a grassy slope, and onto a sports field built so patients could play football or soccer, but I’d never seen anyone do anything but walk on it. We were silent and I was glad. I needed time to adjust to Jack being in this place, witnessing the worst of me. Obviously he’d tracked me down. How, I didn’t know, didn’t need to know. But I was glad he was here.

“Have you ever had a time in your life when everything went wrong at once?” I said suddenly.

Jack didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I studied his profile. “Oh?”

“Sometimes I think my whole life is just everything going wrong at once.”

My thoughts exactly. “But you’re a pastor.” And not locked in a nuthouse.

Jack smiled. “I’m a pastor so I have everything figured out? Not even close.” He glanced at me. “Life is complex. People are complex.” He said it calmly; no need to get upset, kick up a fuss. Just accept it.

“People,” I said. “I’d be perfectly happy in my life if it weren’t for other people.”

He didn’t laugh. “There are days I think the same thing.” We walked on, our faces cooled by the October wind. “But, truth is, most people aren’t really evil. Most of us are just scared.”

I thought of Donna, her cool matter-of-factness. “Evil isn’t scared of anything.”

Jack looked at me for a moment then spoke slowly, as if each word was being measured and weighed out. “Sometimes evil comes through the front door, robs you blind, and laughs when you cry.”

“But?”

He looked straight ahead, squinting into the wind. “I don’t have a ‘but’ for you.”

We fell into silence and I studied the grass with each step. “You’re handling yourself very well.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. I walked out on you at the restaurant, but you still came here to see me.” I half turned to him, not quite able to look into his face. “And you don’t even seem nervous about being alone with someone who is being held here because she attacked a banker.”

“I’m a pastor. I deal with crazy all the time,” Jack said. “And I know a lot of people who fantasize about attacking bankers.”

I laughed. The sound, strange in my throat, was music in my ears. Despite my misgivings I’d missed him. “Can I buy you a coffee, Pastor Jack?”

He grinned. “I’d love one.” We turned and made our way back to the center.

I tapped the rim of Jack’s mug. “Actually the coffee here is free.”

He took a sip. “Good. I’ll have two.”

The dining room was much like you’d expect to see in a school or old-folks home. Rows of tables and chairs, floors waxed to maximum shine. We had scheduled hours for meals, but coffee and other beverages were always available. A homey touch in the middle of institutional hell. Jack and I were alone, two people in a sea of dining furniture. From the kitchen, sounds of food being prepared chimed.

Jack ran a hand through his dark hair. “Can we talk about what happened with my father?”

I pushed my spine into the back of my chair. A strange topic of conversation considering he’d come to visit me in a mental institution. Not that I wanted to talk about mental institutions either. “I don’t want to go through all of that again, Jack. I’m trying to move on.”

He reached over the table, as if to grab my hands, but he stopped short. “Of course not. I don’t mean the details of what he did. I mean the fact that he’s my father and what that means—” he paused, “to … our friendship.”

My heart pounded a heavy thud, then began to race. “I don’t—”

He interrupted. “What my father did to you left you justifiably angry. And maybe turned you off of God completely.” He drew swirls on the table with his finger. “And the way you looked at me the last time we talked …”

“I know you’re not like your father. It’s just—”

“I’m nothing like him.” He punctuated this with a beseeching look, a sort of pleading. I wanted to smooth it from his face with my hands. He shouldn’t have felt the need to convince me he was different from his father. His kindness over the past months had proven that a hundredfold. It wasn’t Jack I questioned, it was God. I cast my eyes to the floor. “You say I’m loved by a holy God; your father calls me a filthy sinner.” I pulled my chair closer to the table. “Both of you believe you’re speaking for the same God. How can that be? How can one God be saying such opposite things?”

Jack said, “My father did teach me about God, but over the years I’ve come to reject the way my father understands God.” He took another sip of coffee. “I don’t agree with the way he lives out what he believes. For him life is black and white, right and wrong.”

“But not for you?”

He shook his head. “My experiences have taught me to see shades of gray.”

That caught my attention. “What experiences?”

He spread his hands. “My story, like so many, begins with a girl.”

Huh? I felt a pang, like a pinch. “A girl?”

He leaned back and looked over my head, into his past, I assumed. “I had a girlfriend a few years ago. Fiancée, actually.”

In my head I heard the sound that in the comics is spelled “Zonk.” I had only thought of Jack as just Jack. Alone. Virginal. Like Bambi’s dad in the movie, strong and distant and waiting on a cliff top. Unattached, as if he’d just appeared one day, new, unwritten. Now I tried to picture him with someone, holding her, kissing her, loving her. I shook my head. Better not to try to picture it.

“She broke it off.” His fingers played around his mouth. “I had a hard time getting over it.”

“I know what that’s like.” I arranged my face in what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. I had no idea what this had to do with God, but I didn’t care. I wanted to hear this story. “Tell me about her.” I lifted a casual hand.

He fixed me with a long gaze that was like waiting for the click from a reluctant photographer, Take the picture already. “It was ten years ago.” He shook his head, as if surprised by the number. “I was twenty, she was twenty-two. She was new to the city and to our church. The first time I saw her—” His eyes glistened at the memory. “Boom.”

Boom? Oh, please. “You mean she was nice looking? Sort of attractive?”

Jack fixed his gaze on the wall behind me as if his favorite movie was playing there. “Gorgeous, long blonde hair, these big brown eyes, and all smiles.” He smiled too, as if she’d just walked in the room.

“How nice.” If you like that type. Blonde isn’t a real color, it was invented by Hollywood. Everyone knew that. I was surprised by my jealous thoughts. Why should I be affected by a woman from Jack’s past? It had nothing to do with me.

Jack continued, “And, like all gorgeous blondes, she was responsible for my utter downfall.” He chuckled at his joke.

I grimaced. Utter downfall? An overstatement I was sure. “You don’t look ‘downfallen’ to me.”

He looked at me, eyebrows pulled close as if surprised to see me there. “By the time that woman finished making a run through my life, I’d lost everything. Her, my church, my family, everything.”

Lost everything. Jack had lost everything once. I glanced down at my open, empty hands. “How?”

“Helene got pregnant.” He looked into my eyes, a man facing facts. “It wasn’t my baby. We hadn’t slept together.” He laughed again, a short sound that seemed to say, “Sucker.”

“She betrayed you.” My voice hushed like a revelation. You’re betrayed, like me. “You must have been furious.”

He rubbed his hand across his jaw and chin. “I was way more pathetic than that.” He spoke quickly, as if wanting to get the words out and be done with them. “I told her I wanted to marry her anyway. Raise the baby as my own.” He tossed out a snort. “She didn’t want any of it. Said she wanted out, that she couldn’t face people in the church. Said she didn’t love me the way I loved her.” He slapped a hand on his leg. “And that was it. She took off—I haven’t seen her since.”

Took off. Just left, a clean cut, taking everything with her, Jack’s future, the baby, everything. I stared at my shoes, suddenly shy to look at him. Lost everything. “I’m sorry. But it doesn’t explain—”

“My father,” he finished.

I nodded.

“I was in seminary at the time all this happened. A guy in seminary with a pregnant fiancée—” he looked wide-eyed, “—not good.”

“But it wasn’t your baby. And she left you.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “My Dad … Wow. I thought he would have a heart attack.” An easily envisioned event for a man his size, I thought, but kept it to myself. Jack grabbed the front of his own shirt and shook it, an imitation of his father’s hand. “‘Admit your sin like a man,’ Dad said.”

I slapped my hand on the table. “That’s not fair. You hadn’t done anything wrong. How could he not believe you?” What was the matter with that man? It was as if he were part bulldozer.

Jack frowned. “Like I said, Dad’s world is black and white. Helene was a beautiful woman; there was never any doubt in my father’s mind that the child was mine. He said he’d always suspected I was morally weak.”

I’d never met anyone more upright than Jack Slater Jr.

I pictured my father’s face, no minister of the gospel, no churchgoing man, but I couldn’t imagine him saying anything so cruel to me—or anyone else. I reached across the table and laid my hand over Jack’s. He placed his other hand over top of mine.

“We argued,” Jack said, “more than once. Then one Sunday morning, Dad stood in the pulpit and announced my ‘sin’ to the church.” Jack fell silent for several seconds, then, “I was beyond shocked. As soon as the words left his mouth, people turned in their seats to look at me, craning their necks to get a good look at the disgraced pastor’s son sitting in the back.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “And I saw my father and his church for what they were.”

“Your father is a beast,” I said, horrified by the story.

Jack nodded, but said, “I can’t say that. He’s just a man who cares more about his image than anything else.”

The intercom crackled to life and, for the second time that day, my name was paged. I checked my watch. It was time for medication, a process I didn’t want Jack to witness. “I have to go.”

I walked him toward the public exit, the boundary that separated me from the rest of society, for their protection. “Your life was like a soap opera,” I said on the way.

A grin flashed then faded. “Everyone’s life is a soap opera sometimes. No one is exempt—not you, not me, not even my father. It’s taken me a long time to untangle the mess left by that time, but through it I came to understand God was with me in the middle of my chaos. He was there, helping me make sense out of it.”

“That’s not what your father would think. He’d say you were being punished for your sins.”

He nodded. “I know. But over the last ten years I’ve come to realize that I’m not responsible for my dad’s relationship with God. Or for how it plays out in his life. I pray for him and trust God is with him just like I believe God is with me.”

I stared hard at the gold sign that read Reception, thinking about his words. All I knew was that if I were God, I would have abandoned The Reverend years ago. “I have to go,” I said, my voice tight.

“I’ll come again?” he said, seeking permission.

I nodded. “Yes.” Then added, “Thank you.”

I told the receptionist to buzz Jack out. She pushed a button and the locked door clicked open. Jack pulled it open.

I stepped toward him. “How did you forgive him?”

He chewed his lip. “I’m still working on it.”

I had entered that place an expectant mother.

I left empty, body and soul.

I’d proven beyond all doubt that my marriage—Kevin—is the only thing that matters. I’m a hallowed saint in the tabernacle of our marriage. A martyr in the church of Kevin.

I had stayed overnight, an expensive precautionary step, but Kevin had insisted. He said he wanted to be certain there was no infection or side effects. Now I’m home, and it’s two days before Christmas.

Kevin speaks into the phone. “Kate has the flu. We’ll still have Christmas morning here, she insists, but we’ll need to scale it back.” He listens, making “uh-huh” sounds every few moments. “Sounds great. See you then.” He hangs up and turns to me. “Your mom said she’ll make the waffles Christmas morning so you won’t have to.” He pauses. “She said she wants to have as normal a Christmas as possible.”

I wrap my arms around myself, shivering. Normal. Dad gone, taken by a swollen river—this is our first Christmas without him. I feel his absence like a heartbeat. I’m wearing a warm red sweater, so soft it feels like a hug. I nod, but say nothing. Everything hurts. I look at my husband, marveling at how easily he lied to my mother just moments ago. The lies dropped from his mouth with such ease, it was like an art form.

But who am I to judge? I don’t want my mother to know—not now, not ever. “I’m going upstairs,” I say, and make a slow getaway on unsteady legs.

I awake in the middle of the night. It’s dark, but the blind hasn’t been drawn. Kevin’s side of the bed is smooth and empty. I’m sweating. My body feels like it’s on fire. I go into the bathroom and run cold water, splashing my face again and again. I look down and see blood. On my clothes, on the floor between my feet. Without thought or feeling, I strip my clothes off and rinse them in the tub.

After I dress in clean nightclothes, I go downstairs in search of Kevin. It’s dark, and for a moment I think Kevin must not be home. But where would he be in the middle of the night, with his wife bleeding and feverish upstairs? I turn down the hall and see light peering out from his closed den. I walk over and press my ear to the door. Kevin’s voice. He’s on the phone.

“I don’t know,” he says in response to a question I can’t hear. “She’s weak, lost a lot of blood. But she’ll be fine in a few days.”

I silently panic. Who is he talking to? Who else knows what I’ve done? I clutch the walls for support.

Kevin says, “She needs me here. There’s no one else. Everyone thinks she had the flu. I don’t know when I’ll be able to call you again. I’ll do my best.” There is a long pause, then, “I love you too.”

I hear the click as Kevin hangs up the phone. I hear his breath, a long sigh, like a man with problems, a man who has decisions to make. I pad up the stairs and go back to bed.

The room was dark around me. The shower was running; my roommate’s loud humming filled the space. Flat on my back in bed, I watched the pictures of my past swirl around me. They were outside of me, but close, nearly touching. They dipped and pulsed, danced and swayed like lovers. I watched them, feeling calm.

The images linked, creating a chain I could follow from start to finish. Soon they were whole, spelling out my life in crisp detail. I wanted to close my eyes against the glare of them, but instead I watched, unblinking. Soon I would invite them in, collect them, let them return inside my skin. But for a moment I held them at bay.

“Kevin?” Where was he now? Heaven or hell, or some other place? Was he with our child? The question burned, so fresh was the knowledge that I’d lost her (a girl, yes, I was sure, a brown-haired girl).

“Kevin, I need to know,” I whispered. I couldn’t let go of him. I saw his face in every memory, every hope, everything I’d tried to accomplish. I had gone through with the abortion to prove not just my love, but that my life was in his hands. So when he died, I’d lost everything: Kevin, our child, and all my reasons for doing what I had done. All my striving had come to nothing.

“What did I do to make you leave me?” His face danced before me, moving in time with my memories. How does something go so wrong?

“I loved you so much, Kevin. I don’t even want to know if you are sorry anymore.” My stomach knotted in a dry heave. “Just tell me what I did to make you stop loving me.”

The shower turned off, the humming stopped. Anger rose up in me, bent and fruitless. The memories washed me in truth. My truth. I could deny them no longer. I cried as my body filled with the pictures of my past, and the self-loathing they brought with them.