Can I Get An Amen? (35 page)

At first I couldn’t move; I was frozen for three interminable heartbeats with blood roaring through my ears as my mind worked furiously to scroll through the possible explanations for why my father was lying facedown on the floor: heart attack… stroke… aneurism. Then I saw the vomit and I knew. I ran to him and knelt down. “Dad!” I said loudly, with my face next to his. He didn’t move. There wasn’t even a rise and fall of his chest.

I know that I grabbed the phone; I know I dialed 911. But those memories are vague and cloudy. What I do remember, what I can still replay in my head with absolute clarity, is picking up my father’s hand, closing my eyes, and praying. Stripped of
everything else, every pretense, every shred of pride, I had nothing left in me but my desire for my father to live. With my eyes closed, all I heard were my whispered pleas to God, and my breath. I don’t know how long it was before the paramedics got there, but when they came rushing in I told them what had happened.

“My father’s tried to kill himself.” It came out so matter-of-fact.

I didn’t know what he had taken, but I knew what he had done. Only later did we find the bottle of vodka, along with an empty bottle of tranquilizers, placed neatly in the wastebasket under his desk beneath a stack of papers. On his chair was a note written on his monogrammed stationery. It had the name of his insurance company, where he had a sizable life policy that he had purchased decades ago, a policy that didn’t have a suicide clause.

I rode in the back of the ambulance, still holding my father’s hand and still praying as the paramedics moved about, communicating with each other in a brisk, austere language all their own. At the hospital I called my family. I found a secluded corner of the waiting room and turned against the wall. I called my mother at least a dozen times, but her phone was in the pocket of her mink coat, vibrating mutely in the catacomb of the Arnolds’ foyer closet. Luke answered right away, sounding tipsy and relaxed.
Get Kat and come to Allen Memorial. It’s Dad.

I weighed the phone in my hand for a few moments, pretending to debate doing what I had wanted to do all along. Then I called Mark. I was always going to call Mark. I called him because I knew he would come; I called him because I never should have left him. And tragedy has a way of delivering a brand of clarity all its own.

“Ellen?” he said tentatively.

When I heard his voice, feeling rushed back into my numb heart. I couldn’t formulate words over my tears.

“Ellen, what’s wrong?”

“It’s my dad,” I wept. The veins in my neck felt like they were strangling me.

“Where are you?” he asked, urgent but calm.

I told him.

“I’ll be right there.”

Though I never intended to admit it, waiting for Mark to arrive was more excruciating than waiting for the ambulance. As the automatic doors of the hospital silently parted, he rushed through. Our eyes met and he came to me. With vomit still on the knees of my black panty hose, I fell into him. His body yielded slightly but was tense.

At first, he was gentle but clinical, asking questions. “What did he take? Have the doctors been out yet? Where is your mother? Should I go and get her?”

I clung to his jacket like a child. “No, please don’t go. Please.”

He was next to me when I told my mother. She had gotten all the way home before she checked her phone. She had seen the state of my father’s office and the note on his chair and she knew. “He’ll be okay, Mom,” I whimpered. “I promise he’ll be okay.”

My mother arrived before Luke and Kat. Perhaps it was the shock, but when she saw Mark, it was as though she had expected him to be there. Like he belonged there, next to me. Luke was the same way, nodding in acknowledgment before asking about Dad. Only Kat, whom Mark had never met, recoiled a bit when she saw him, her tear-streaked face suspicious and wary. But as we all sat together on the immobilized blue pleather chairs, waiting for news, even Kat let her guard down.

It was the middle of the night when a tired-looking doctor in
blue scrubs came out and told us that my father would live. “He will be unconscious for a while still,” said the doctor, seeming a bit put out by the wastefulness of it all, the needlessness of this entirely preventable event. There are blessedly few moments like that in life, when you see someone you love teetering on the stark line that separates life from death, light from dark. And when I found out that my father had landed in the light, it was as if the hand that had been twisting my chest suddenly released its grip, and I could breathe.

After relief flooded our bodies, after we thanked, thanked, thanked the doctor, after we wrapped our arms around one another in shared gratitude, it became quiet. Mom and Luke both stepped aside to make phone calls—Mom to Aunt Kathy and Luke to Mitch. Mark excused himself. I collapsed into a chair. Kat, who had stayed on the fringes of the group, pushed away from the wall against which she had been leaning and walked toward me. She took the seat next to me and rested her elbows on her knees, the look on her face ancient and sad. Her full lips were cracked and peeling, with a hairline strip of dried blood forming in one of the ridges. She had been uncharacteristically silent as we held our vigil, even when she learned that my mother and I had been at the Arnolds’ party when it happened.

“It was Christian Arnold,” was all she said. And there, under the buzz of the fluorescent lights, in a waiting room surrounded by strangers whose loved ones were hidden behind those steel doors, I finally understood. I understood the anger that had surfaced in Kat that night when she walked into my parents’ house to see the Arnolds at their table. We had all betrayed her without even knowing it.

I breathed a sound of recognition.
Christian Arnold,
I repeated to myself. I had long ago stopped wondering who the
father was. I sometimes even doubted that Kat herself was sure. But while Kat was wild, she hadn’t run rampant. Though she neither confirmed nor denied it, I had heard hushed conversations between my parents about the overnight trip that Kat had taken with the boys’ and girls’ varsity lacrosse teams, and its coincidental, suspicious timing with her pregnancy. Christian played lacrosse. I believe that he went on to be captain, the spring that Kat officially dropped out of school.

“I never told anyone,” she said. “Only him.”

“Oh, Kat.” I took her hand. And she let me. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and closed her wet eyes.

. . .

When my father regained consciousness, Mark waited while my mother, Luke, Kat, and I went in to see him. I imagined that we would cautiously surround his bed, whispering our greetings like lullabies.
We love you, Dad. We are so glad you’re okay.
But as soon as my mother saw him, her jaw clenched and her hands formed tiny fists and she rushed his bed, beating at his legs like they were snakes under the blanket. Her admonishments were strung between sobs. “How dare you? How could you? How could you try to leave me?” She wept and wailed and pounded at him until he caught her hands and their foreheads met and they cried, their tears mixing.

Kat knelt by the foot of his bed, weeping in the silent, muffled way that Kat sometimes did. My father’s hand reached down and tried to find the top of her head. “I’m so sorry, Kat, my little girl. I’m so sorry.” His words came out in sorrowful sputters, and I knew that his apology extended far beyond the events that had brought us all here.

Luke wrapped his arm around me and inched me closer to
the bed, and my mother reached up and grabbed his hand. “Hold hands,” my mother commanded softly, her voice shaky. Kat clasped my father’s hand; Luke and Kat held mine. My mother closed her eyes and began a prayer of thanks.

When she had finished, I kissed my father on the cheek and looked at my mother, who nodded. She knew what I had to do. And so without a word I left the room and went back to find Mark. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his feet propped up on the chair across from him. His breath was the slow and steady sort that comes on the brink of sleep. I sat next to him, then reached over to pick up his hand, cradling it in both of mine. He took a jagged, startled breath and opened his eyes.

“Mark,” I said, staring at the dry, red patches over his knuckles. “I’m so sorry.”

He looked at me but did not speak.

Seeing the wariness in his eyes brought on fresh tears. “Please?” I pleaded. “Please forgive me?”

“I’m not going to give up the ministry, Ellen.”

I pulled myself onto his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t want you to,” I said, my damp face hiding in his neck. “I don’t want you to change.”

And then his hands slowly found their place on my back.

I
t is seven months later and I’m sitting next to my mother, four rows away from the pulpit at Prince of Peace Church. Mitch and Luke are on my other side. Mark is speaking this morning on grace, on the idea that God’s love is without conditions. Sometimes I still notice the curious stares from the other congregants.
That’s the pastor’s girlfrien
d. I hear she’s not even a Christian.
But it’s not enough to make me run, not even close.

My father was kept in the hospital for several days after that night. We all stayed, taking shifts to ensure he would rarely be alone. And it was during that time, when we were so grateful to have one another, so grateful to be a part of our family—our flawed, imperfect family—that my mother first met Mitch.

Mitch had come because he loved Luke. It was really that simple, that plain. He didn’t intend to infringe on what he assumed was a private, delicate time, and so he met Luke at a small table in the hospital cafeteria. He and Mitch were still there when my mother returned earlier than expected from one of her brief,
infrequent dashes home to shower and change clothes. She was headed for the elevator when she saw them, sitting with their heads inclined, holding hands discreetly under the table. She faltered for a second; then, feeling her stare, Luke turned his head and met her eyes.

I don’t know what Luke expected her to do, but it certainly wasn’t to walk calmly to their table and shake Mitch’s hand. “I’m Patty Carlisle,” she said. “You must be Mitch.” No one knows how she knew his name. Maybe one of us had slipped and said it. Maybe she had known it all along. Either way, Luke hadn’t expected her to say it with such warmth. “The Lord prepared my heart.” That’s what my mother says when asked about that moment. “He used me to demonstrate his grace.” I tend to think it was one of those rare, pure instances when we don’t put qualifications on love. When we need it so desperately, so urgently, that we accept it when it’s offered. So maybe my mother and I are really saying the same thing.

It didn’t happen instantly, Mitch becoming part of our family. It happened slowly, gradually, in a series of increasingly frequent meetings, some more tense than others. It’s still happening. And there is still far to go. But it’s better. And I’ll take better.

Less than a month after my father was released from the hospital, my parents had to leave their home. We all helped them pack and move their things—Kat, Luke, Mitch, Mark, and I—into a rented two-bedroom condo in Kat’s complex. My mother stared at the house as they pulled away, quoting softly from the Book of Matthew, “ ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust corrupt… But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ ” My father rested his hand on her knee as they drove off.

We have found many small mercies in their situation. My father, having taken a desk job with the commercial construction company of an old associate, has a steady but relatively small paycheck. And though much of what would be considered their “wealth” was lost, their IRAs remained intact. My father still hopes to rebuild his business, but he knows it will be a long road, maybe too long a road at his age. He keeps himself busy, though, and is with Kat this morning, looking at possible spaces for a new salon she’s hoping to open. My mother, having found that a forty-year gap in employment is problematic in today’s job market, has taken a more active role in managing my parents’ finances and continues to volunteer at the family center, where I sometimes join her.

I never returned to Kent & Wagner. After a few days, I called and left a message for Philip. It was brief and to the point. I didn’t hear back from him. I sent an e-mail to Brenda in which I apologized for leaving so suddenly, and congratulated her on becoming a grandmother. We exchanged a few more e-mails, the last of which indicated that she had given her notice at Kent & Wagner and was moving to Chicago. “I can be a secretary anywhere,” she wrote. “But I can only be a grandmother there.”

Jill is due in a matter of days with a baby boy that they are naming Gregory Jr., after his father. She has asked me to be his godmother. “And when you and Mark get married, Greg Jr. can be your ring bearer,” she suggested, pushing, as always, for us to “make it official.”

Later, I’ll go to work at the Italian restaurant where I waitress several nights a week. It’s not a career, but it helps supplement my gig as an intern at the magazine where Mitch works. “They are going to offer you something permanent soon, Elle,” promised Mitch, who got me the position. But I don’t mind
paying my dues, even if it means being the oldest intern in the history of the publication. I live simply, in a studio apartment near Mark, and use the money from my divorce settlement to get me by until I have an actual salary.

Soon Mark’s sermon will end, and he’ll step away from the pulpit, looking at me as he makes his way down the center aisle. He’ll spend a while greeting the congregation, patiently listening, nodding his head and offering comfort, hope, and kindness. I’ll stare at him as he gets pulled from conversation to conversation, and I’ll see him sneak glances at me as I talk with my mother, Luke, and Mitch.

My mother will leave first—there is a new church that she has heard wonderful things about, and she is just dying to visit it. Mitch and Luke will then walk to Luke’s car, holding hands, two people who love each other.