Lay It on My Heart (24 page)

“How about those verses, Charmaine?” says Phoebe. “Do I need to look them up?” Some of the air's going out of her, and her voice sounds weary.

“Do you know them?” The doctor's loose neck turns toward me, a soft rudder.

“Does she know them,” Phoebe says.

“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands,” I mumble, “as unto the Lord.”

“And they say
you've
been confused,” Phoebe says to my father. “I'm the one who's been confused.”

“Do you still pray?” I ask him. “Have you heard the voice of God?”

My father lifts his head but leaves his body bent forward. “I still pray.”

“Without ceasing?”

“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“Charmaine brings up a good point, David,” says the doctor. “About the voice of God. Do you want to try to explain? You don't have to. Not right now. Are you tired?”

I hold my breath and will Phoebe not to say anything, and she doesn't.

“Can you hear this?” the doctor asks her. “I really am concerned for you.”

The anger has burned out of Phoebe now, and what's left is worse. She palms her brow and lifts, and the skin above her eyes stretches upward. Then she takes her hand away and everything settles sadly into place.

“You've heard a bit of this before,” the doctor says. “The voice of God has been a pretty powerful idea in your home.”

Phoebe nods tiredly. “I'm guessing you're not a believer.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might,” she says. “I don't know.”

“Phoebe.” It's the first time my father has said her name, and at the sound of it she tears up.

“Has he told you about how we met?” she asks the doctor. “How the still, small voice of God whispered in his ear and told him I was to be his wife?”

“This must be very difficult for you,” the doctor says.

The tears are leaking out of Phoebe's eyes now.

“Don't cry,” says my father.

“How about you?” the doctor says, turning to me.

But Phoebe is crying, and Phoebe has been mad. And if I feel something, too, if this is as difficult for me as it is for her, then she and I will be having the feelings together at the same time, like we're the same person. Which means the only thing I feel is numb.

“She takes it in,” my father says to the doctor. “All of it. I never saw it before. I'm sorry.”

“You see more now,” says the doctor.

I think my father's talking about Phoebe, who has begun weeping silently, but when I look up, his unhappy eyes are on me.

“Are you still a prophet?” I say.

We all wait for his answer.

“I don't know,” he says finally. “I don't know who I am.”

“That makes two of us,” says Phoebe. “At least.”

I want to tell my father that I know who he is. Or who I want to believe he is. I want to believe he's like the girl's father in
A
Wrinkle in Time
, a hero on a mission that has gone off course. A father who just needs a little help finding his way home. In the book it's a matter of traveling through space and time to a planet where her brother and father are held captive by an evil, throbbing brain that loses its power only in the face of love. In real life that kind of travel is impossible, unless you're somewhere near a black hole, maybe, where space and time flatten out, but even that, even navigating time and space, still seems easier than helping my real-life father find his way back to himself so he can come home.

“I love you,” I say, which is how the book girl defeats the evil brain, and my father appreciates the words, I can tell, but nothing else happens. The room stays white, Phoebe keeps crying, the doctor strokes his mustache, and my father, my father says again, to us all, that he's sorry.

When we stand up to leave, my father hugs me good-bye. His body is softer than it was, and he holds me gingerly, like the burned parts under his clothes might still hurt. “I hope you never have to feel like this,” he says.

“Why should she?” Phoebe asks, wiping her eyes, stepping in between us. With her hands on my shoulders, she steers me toward the door. “Because it's hereditary, you mean? I, for one, am not borrowing trouble. She's half me too.” Phoebe does not say good-bye. We wait for the doctor in the hallway, and when he joins us I listen to him tell Phoebe there are things she can do for herself to get through this tough time.

“You know what?” Phoebe says. “I think you've got enough on your plate right here, professionally, without worrying about me. And I've done a lot already. In fact, I think I've done just about the best I could, and look where it's landed us. But thanks for all your help.” Doctor Phillips covers his mouth with his hand again. He holds Phoebe's gaze with his own kind eyes. “I can tell you don't think I mean it,” Phoebe says, “but I do. I'm not being sarcastic anymore. I just wish we'd met you before we all became so ridiculous.”

The word
ridiculous
hangs in the air all the way down the hall. Then my father comes out of the white room and ambles after us. I stop and wait. When he reaches the top of the curved staircase, he holds out a pair of suede moccasins like the ones he's wearing. They have been unevenly stitched together with heavy leather cording, and the foot bed is made of cream-colored fleece. I slip a hand into each of them, and when I look up to say thank you, my father's face is scarier than anything so far. He's smiling uncertainly at me, hopefully, as if I'm the person who could tell him what's supposed to happen next.

While Phoebe handles paperwork at the front desk, I take off my tennis shoes and slip my feet into the moccasins. I try them out a little in the lobby.

“Don't go anywhere,” says Phoebe, but I do. I head outside to wait for her under the porte-cochère. In the early dark, the air has a chill. I keep walking, telling myself I'll wait for her at the end of the long drive, at the edge of the two-lane country road that leads back to the interstate. But when I reach that point and she still hasn't come outside, I turn my back on the huge house and start walking on the shoulder of the road.

There's hardly any traffic. I can feel the rough gravel through the moccasins, but not sharply enough to hurt. Beside the road runs a ditch, and on the other side of the ditch stretches the split-rail fence, and beyond the fence, two large thoroughbreds stand close together, watching me. “Hey there,” I say softly. I can tell they're listening, just like I can tell with Titus. I would like to cross the ditch and climb the fence and stand beside them, if they'd let me, between their solid, comforting bodies.

Somewhere far behind me, the Pinto sputters to life. Soon Phoebe pulls up and leans out the driver's side window. “What's the idea?” she says.

I keep walking and she inches the car forward. It was dark before, but now the Pinto's headlights make the sky darker. It feels as though there's nothing in between me and the huge empty spaces over the horse farms, all that air, the atmosphere, and then everything beyond that. I see myself walking on the surface of the globe, on the underside of it, maybe, and I remember that gravity depends on how dense matter is. It's not nearly as strong on the moon as it is on our planet, and not nearly as strong on our planet as, say, on the sun or in a black hole. If I knew how to rearrange matter, all I would have to do is lift my feet in the right way and fall into all that space.

“You want to walk a little?” Phoebe says. She breathes out in exasperation over the struggling engine. “Okay. Walk. Walk your heart out. For a little bit.” She slows the Pinto down to a shuddering idle and drops back, so that I'm walking just outside the light of the low beams. I keep walking as if I'm trying to get away from the light, as if God himself has told me not to turn around for any reason, or I might turn to stone. Or salt. Poor Lot's wife, her home burning behind her. Maybe she looked back because she thought a frozen eternity, facing what used to be home, would be better than a future without it. Maybe God didn't even turn her to salt as a punishment. Maybe it was her tears that did the job, and God was just warning her that he was about to burn up everything in the world that meant more to her than him, and that watching would be too much for anyone to bear.

When I stop walking, when I do look back, the residential recovery mansion no longer shows up behind me. I cross the road in front of the Pinto and get in. Once on the interstate we ride in silence for several long minutes. Phoebe breathes hard, like she is trying not to start crying again, and her breath makes a little circle of steam on the windshield. When she speaks, though, she sounds matter-of-fact. “Your mother is a fool.”

I let the words sit there and wait for more.

“Not for the reasons folks might think. Not because I believed my husband was a prophet or because I followed him as the head of my household, against my own better judgment. And that's plenty to make me a fool, you better believe it.”

“You're not a fool,” I say, because her voice is so flat I can't stand it.

“I'm a fool because I thought I was already completely worn out,” she says. “I thought I was beyond feeling hurt.” She turns to me, and even though her voice has been flat, her eyes are wretched. For the second time this evening I wish one of my parents wanted something from me. “Don't forget this,” she says. “Be smarter.” Then she laughs, a single chop of sound. “And if I knew how to tell you to do that, I would.”

The rest of the drive home I'm looking out into the darkness beyond the twin cones of our headlights, thinking of all the fields and horses, then all the tobacco barns, everything that I know is there but can't see. And high above all that, in space, black holes are pulling everything, all kinds of matter, all kinds of light and energy, into themselves. They can't ever be filled up. You could stand at the edge of one and try as hard as you wanted to; you could throw in every single piece of matter you have, hoping just to hear something land. You could stand there until you wore yourself out, or until you got mad about all the stuff you'd let go of, missing it, or you could stand there listening so hard to the silence that you'd begin to imagine you were hearing things after all.

I
GET CALLED TO THE
office again Wednesday, during activity, in the middle of Kelly-Lynn telling me that her mother has checked herself out of rehab, broken up with Rob, and is relocating them to Omaha. “She's big into starting over,” Kelly-Lynn says. “Maybe in my next school I'll call myself Theresa, or Charmaine.”

I'm picturing Kelly-Lynn making her way down the hall of a strange new school, pretty enough to turn heads, no one knowing one single thing about her. Except the school officials with their thick file. I don't even pay attention to what Coach Doran's saying at the mike until Kelly-Lynn says, “That's you.”

I'm wondering if Principal Conrad changed his mind since yesterday and I'm in trouble after all, but the secretary just calls me “hon” and tells me I should go straight home after school instead of to the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center. Because my grandmother's had another stroke. As the secretary speaks, the room loses focus for a second, then comes back with raw color. She's saying that her father had two strokes and didn't die until years later, and her brother just had his first stroke and is already back at work.

“I'll say a prayer,” says the secretary, and what I think back at her is
Good luck
, and I don't even care anymore that it's a fool's game to be angry at God. It's clear now that nothing is going to be the way it was. Not for my father. Not for Phoebe and my father. Not for me. Now maybe not for Daze. None of which you're even supposed to pray for anyway, not really. Only for the holy state of reception. To God's voice, God's call, God's comfort. Which is where prayer without ceasing comes in, only too bad it's impossible. Unless there happens to be something wrong with your brain.

The rest of the school day goes on around me, and then it's over. “You in trouble?” says Tracy on the bus. “I heard them calling your name.”

I think about not telling her, but I can't really imagine anything anyone says making me feel worse than I already do. “My grandmother had a stroke.”

“She old?”

“Kind of,” I say. “Not that old.”

“She bad off?”

“I don't know,” I say. “She had one before.”

Ravenna's behind the wheel this afternoon, and the bus is orderly. Even Cecil Goode only smirks at us on the way to his seat. “There's always next time,” he calls softly in my direction as we file out of the parking lot with the other buses. We ride quietly through the county, through all the spiky fields of harvested tobacco. Then through town, where we pass everything I've always known. The United Methodist Church, the Church of God. First Community, my old elementary school. We pass the tree streets that lead up to the scrubby field where the water tower stands high on its hill, the unlit cross a faint mark against the cloudy gray sky.

The leaves are starting to change color, but only if you look hard. My father once explained to me that the reason some maple trees turn red is that the sugar they use as food gets trapped in the leaves when the days get shorter. Other colors, the yellow and orange, have been in the leaves all along, only the chlorophyll from sunlight covers them up all summer and makes them look green. So in the fall some things get trapped, like in the red sugar leaves, and other things, things that were there all along, get revealed.

Beside me, Tracy is digging into the sole of her tennis shoe with a ballpoint pen.

“Are your parents divorced?” I ask her.

She doesn't look up. All the weight in her face pulls her cheeks down toward her lips into a troubled pout.

“Did you hear?” I say.