Conundrum (53 page)

Never.

Healing had always receded on the horizon, dropping farther and farther back, like a wavering mirage, teasing with its promise of life-giving water. He thinks, We are all thirsting wanderers, desperate for a drop of soothing water to cool our tongues as we aimlessly traverse this earthly hell.

There is no alternate route. None.

A glint of light catches on the metal’s edge as he turns the lightweight blade in his hand. He squints, pauses. His sense of hearing is unusually heightened. The room pulses and takes on a life of its own; a ticking clock becomes a rhythmic heartbeat, causing surges of perspiration to trickle down the sides of his neck, soaking the cotton shirt as he stands, hesitates, holds the object up to study its smooth surface, finely polished, noticeably sharp.

He’d never before considered how small and innocuous this thing felt in the palm of his hand. Yet so capable of slicing through flesh with precision, severing blood vessels, separating muscle from bone, tissue from tendons, all with the slight pressure one might use in peeling an apple.

Hardly innocuous. For even a surgeon’s scalpel must tear open flesh and draw blood before it can do a healing work.

Pain precedes healing. This truth has taken him a lifetime to learn.

But there is a wash of relief that follows ablution, and the soul thus rid of a lifetime’s burden of contamination becomes keenly aware of a glorious sense of freedom.

He can taste it; he is that close.

A glance at the clock tells him it is almost time. Soon will come the culmination of his story, the point to which all the divergent paths of his life have unknowingly led him. All the hurtful, agonizing moments he thought were intended for harm God actually intended for good, for the saving of life. But how could he have known? When immersed in pain, there is only pain. He feels as if he has roamed the wilderness his entire life, clueless, directionless, exhausted. Depleted not just in body but in spirit, yearning for a word that might lift him above his circumstances and whisk him away from his life.

He hears the sound of car doors slamming, voices overlapping. The air is charged as if an electrical summer storm has just blown in. The hairs on his neck stand alert.

His sons.

He sets down the tool he is gripping; he forgot he still had it in hand. He lays it tenderly alongside his finished sculpture, the sculpture he had begun carving for Rachel, all those years ago. The eagle’s eyes are now void of judgment; they stare out vacantly, almost as if listening too.

Finished—after all this time. He cannot fathom the import of his accomplishment. Not yet.

A line from one of Leah’s poems drifts into his head. He had memorized them all long ago, to where they fastened like barnacles onto his limbs and sinews, grown crusty and impermeable with age.

I am a foreigner in this wet desert of twisted coral and pulsating sponge

Where Creole wrasses swarm in neon blue,

Each movement of my hand makes them dart in dance.

I conduct a ballet on the edge of the precipice.

He feels a smile inch up his face. That is how he sees her still, dancing on the edge of a knife—a knife so much like the one he just now set down.

The kind that cuts both ways.

Exuberant voices—like a choir of angels singing—rise in volume. His sons are coming around the house toward the garage. His knees buckle as he tries to stand. He collapses back onto his stool. He listens intently, sifting through the sounds, his attention riveted in anticipation of the one voice that will both break and mend his heart. 

Joseph.

His son, always a blur, a skew of light that struck the eyes and caused you to squint. The kind of glare that cast a long shadow on everything in proximity. It was only by his light that Jake saw everything else clearly.

Why hadn’t the tremor in Joey’s voice that day set off an alarm? At the time, he didn’t think anything of it. Maybe Joey had picked up tension from listening to those hushed conversations, Jake’s worry over Rachel’s health. Joey listened, noticed everything.

He chided himself. It was too late, far too late for recriminations, for what ifs and if onlys. But still . . . He wishes he had stopped, laid a hand on Joey’s shoulder, and asked, “What do you mean? Who has to die?”

A tear splashes onto his cheek, containing that one tiny wish. He wipes it away with the back of his hand.

He lifts his tired head in the direction of her abandoned garden and remembers the prodigious greenery, the potency of life bursting from the earth, escaping over fences. How everything Rachel’s hands touched became infused with vitality. Oh, how he misses her.

He turns and studies his sculpture on the shelf before him. For years, as that piece of wood sat unfinished, those unformed eyes watched him stumble through his life, silently laughed in judgment from a dusty cobwebbed shelf. He did not touch metal to that wood for nearly thirty years, not until life had dug a deep enough groove into his heart and punctured the wellspring, freeing his captive spirit. Not until now.

It is time.

His sojourn through the wilderness is over. He turns his head toward the door. Tears fill the pools of his eyes, but through the distortion of his watery lenses he can make out the distinctive shape approaching him, carried on a bier of jubilant voices. A mirage materializing in the heat waves of time.

He fears his heart will break.

Joseph, my Joseph . . .

Part One: 1971–1974

Exodus

Exodus: origin—Greek
exodos
, from
hodos
: “way.” A going out; a departure.

1971

Smiling Faces

Smiling faces sometimes pretend to be your friend

Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within

Smiling faces, they don’t tell the truth

Smiling faces, tell lies and I got proof

Beware, beware of the handshake

That hides behind the snake

I’m telling you beware

Beware of the pat on the back

It just might hold you back

Jealousy

Misery

Envy

—
Undisputed Truth

If God’s voice had boomed from the heavens, it would not have been any more compelling than Ethan’s irritating pronouncement in the dark hushes of night.

“Get up, college boy.”

At the sudden shattering of sleep, Jake fumbled for his alarm clock and pushed the button that displayed the uncivilized hour of four a.m. The green numbers on the clock face blinked at him impassively.

Ethan didn’t wait for Jake’s response—the moan buried under bedclothes, hoping to soften the blow Jake knew was forthcoming. Jake jerked intuitively and tipped his head left. Ethan’s fist glanced off the pillow. A lucky guess. This time. This
last
time, Jake told himself with some sense of comfort. But dread filled that space quickly as the well of promise ran dry in the harsh confines of his dark bedroom. He rolled to the floor with a thud, instinctively untangling blankets and jumping to his feet in one swift motion, arms at the ready, protecting his face. His eye throbbed from the smack Ethan had given him two days earlier as they stacked wood together. Jake had already forgotten why his brother had swung his way. It didn’t matter though. Never did.

“I don’t have time to go with you. I still need to pack.”

“You’ll have plenty of daylight left for that. You don’t want to upset the old man, do you? He wants to give you a proper send-off.”

Clothes flew at him. His thick flannel shirt, the green-and-blue checkered one his mother had given him for his birthday, caught on his shoulder. Jeans whacked his ribs. He bent over to pick up the pants and a boot grazed his face; laces tickled his nose.
Send-off?
A joke; rather, a punishment. For what? Following a dream? For having ambition to be more than just an insipid carbon copy of his father?
“Think you’re such hot stuff? You’re bigger than your britches and that big wide world out there is going to bite you back. Just what in the world do you think some college degree is going to give you that you can’t get here?”

Jake’d had to bite his lip to keep from flinging the obvious answer at his brother:
Distance.

Jake rubbed sleep from his eyes. “Get out and let me get dressed already.”

“No whining and woosing out. Or I’ll aim better.”

The door closed. Ethan knew not to slam a door at that hour. Jake heard floorboards squeak below—their dad fixing breakfast, gathering gear. His mother had years ago stopped waking early on hunting days. The Abrams boys didn’t need coddling, according to his father.
You just go on and sleep in, get your beauty rest
, he’d tell her
. We men can take care of ourselves.
You’d think they were living back in the pioneer days, the way the two of them carried on, running their hunting and fishing guide business as if it were a religion and they the clergy.

However, they only preached to the choir. The soft city men who paid them exorbitant compensation to drag them up mountains, loaded down with heavy packs and burdensome rifles they’d never operated before in their lives, fixed their eyes in worshipful adoration upon such capable and worthy specimens of real men—men who could trek up a steep rock face at twelve-thousand-foot elevation without breaking a sweat. Jake knew his father took advantage of men who felt somewhere deep in their hearts the need for penance for their sorry excuse for a life, for the selling of their souls to the corporate machine or a life of ease. Was it some primal urging, Jake wondered, that pressed these men to spend their hard-earned paycheck on suffering? Just what was so thrilling about shivering in bone-snapping cold while squatting behind snow-encrusted brush, waiting to shoot some harmless buck intent on scrounging for a few bites of grass peeking through swollen mounds of winter? His father didn’t understand why Jake failed to get a thrill from toes so frozen they felt brittle in your boots, from damp breath that coated your lips with stinging ice, from cramped arms and shoulders that dragged dead-weight carcasses of three-hundred-pound mule deer over a ridge to a freezing jeep, where the vinyl upholstery felt like a sheet of sheer pain against the backs of your legs.

Jake pulled aside the curtain draping the frost-laced window and soft light from the setting moon spilled over the ledge and across the hardwood floor. The mountains, stark and austere and stacked beyond the outstretched prairie, did not beckon. August, and already below-freezing temperatures. In Los Angeles, he’d be able to walk down a street in the middle of winter, in the middle of the night, in a T-shirt and shorts. The thought astonished him. Maybe his light frame, his inability to put a surplus of flesh on his bones or even to feel warm on a balmy summer’s eve, had led him to choose a school in a city where it never snowed. He recited the statistics in his head.
Mediterranean climate. Three hundred and twenty days of sunshine, forty days of rain, average winter temperatures between forty-eight and sixty-five. Sixty-five in January!
He hummed the song “California Dreamin’ ” and a few words tumbled out as he collected his strewn clothing: “.
 
.
 
. on a winter’s day .
 
.
 
. I’d be safe and warm, if I was in LA .
 
.
 
.” Yes sir, he planned to be—as soon as he could sever this constricting umbilical cord and head west.

His mother had wanted him close: CSU Boulder, or DU. She didn’t understand his need.
Needs
. He was twenty-three, way past time. He’d overstayed his childhood. Most students had already graduated by his age. But denied a scholarship and harboring a dread of incurring debt, Jake had stuck it out five long years, living at home and working under his father’s demeaning tutelage, his hegemony that permeated every crevice of Jake’s life and filled him with an intractable compulsion to move away. Far away. He’d stashed away every dollar he earned, found a cheap furnished studio apartment near the bus line that traversed Wilshire Boulevard from Santa Monica to Westwood. He’d worry later how he’d repay his state and federal loans, but he was hardworking if not ambitious. Despite the labels his father stuck on him.

Jake let his fingers run over the smooth, polished head of a fox he had painstakingly carved out of chestnut. His father had no clue about the many dreams simmering and bubbling to the surface of Jake’s imagination. Jake didn’t dare voice his dreams, exposing them to vulnerability, where both his father and Ethan could take potshots at them and hurl them speedily to the ground the way they took aim and fired at a flock of Canada geese passing overhead. He never let on that his hobby was so much more than that, that wood consumed and filled him, the scent intoxicating as he fashioned something nondescript into a work of art. Wood drew passion from his hands, the way a beautiful woman might draw a man’s attention from his task. Distracting. He saw trees not for how they stood in this world but for the other things they could become, not firewood, not furniture, but holding the potential to encapsulate his world, a way for him to interact and immerse, to make a dent—literally—and create transformation.