Matters of Faith (7 page)

It startled me to see Marshall walk up the bumper of his car and onto the hood, oddly reminiscent of the way it had startled me to watch him climb the steps to his first day of elementary school. He got his balance on the shape of the hood, then turned around and held out a hand to Ada. She turned her face up to him and raised her arm. I could see that she was laughing, her mouth open in joy as he helped her up on the bumper and then the hood. She clambered onto the roof while Marshall helped Meghan onto the hood.

They joined Ada on the roof and the three of them lay across it, Marshall in the middle, and gazed up at the stars. My children beneath me, safe in the moonlight, my husband sleeping behind me in our sweetly scented bed, I was all rare, feminine contentment.

Had I known what the next twenty-four hours would bring, I would have flung open the window and launched myself out of it, arcing toward my children in an attempt to cover their fragile bodies with my own, to keep them safe from all that was new.

If she wasn't talking, Marshall could imagine that Meghan wasn't there, and he and Ada were alone, looking at the stars. Of course, the times she wasn't talking were remarkably few and far between. But eventually her small voice faded away as she succumbed to the late hour, and Ada took his hand as they stared up at the sky.

He rolled toward her, raising up on one elbow so he could look down on her face, the skin across her high cheekbones stretched taut and nearly translucent in the moonlight. The soft rush of the surf on the beach filtered through the trees in the quiet, and a barred owl hooted in the distance.

He pushed her collar out of the way with one finger, trailed his fingertips across the base of her neck. She breathed evenly under him, gazing past him at the sky, as if she weren't aware of his presence.

If he stared hard enough, he thought he could see right through her skin, could see the fine arch of her collarbone, the badge of her sternum. Ada remained still as he pressed his lips to hers and tasted the softness of the inside of her top lip.

He ran his fingertips against the side of her breast and nearly moaned when she arched slightly under him and drew a quick breath, the air flowing in past his lips between them. He pulled his head back so he could see her eyes as he pressed more firmly against her breast, and as he did he heard the train coming.

The sound was faint. Ada was likely confusing it with the sound of the surf, and from years of hearing it he knew it wouldn't get much louder before fading away again, but before it did... and there it was. Her eyes widened as the whistle sounded and her mouth opened slightly.

“Is that it?” she whispered.

He nodded, but remained silent, waiting. There were always two at night. Unless the engineer saw that something was on the tracks. But usually it was just two. And there the second one was.

As the sound filtered through the pines and palms, Ada closed her eyes and pulled him down toward her, letting him melt into her, responsive rather than passive now, staying quiet so as not to disturb Meghan. When she moved her hand down and pressed hard through his jeans, he nearly expired with sheer happiness.

The whistle died away without him noticing, and as the sound of the engine faded she pushed him away. Clouds moved across the moon, and when he looked at her now, her eyes were dark and shadowed, her lips a deep, swollen stain.

“Come on,” she said. They woke Meghan and got her into bed without waking his parents, and then, after enough time had passed for Meghan to enter a deep sleep, Ada came to him in his childhood room.

When she left him, before dawn, he knew that there was nothing else he would ever want. Everything he had been looking for had been found.

He found his life.

He found salvation.

And, oh yes, he found God.

THE kids were gone by the time I rose that morning, and the sun had already evaporated any traces of the cool night. Cal had been up for hours, as was his custom, and a half-pot of coffee was waiting for me. I poured a cup and padded across the yard to the outbuilding, pausing for a moment to check on the sunflowers, happy that the rabbits hadn't yet found the tender shoots. Heavy white and green buds were nearly ready to pop on the gardenia. I could already smell them and knew that by this evening at least a few of them would be open, their lush petals as soft as velvet.

I made plans to snip them off their bases and float them in a glass bowl in Meghan's room, as a treat for Ada. I doubted she'd seen, or smelled, many gardenias in Nebraska, and it was a flower that Meghan tolerated beautifully. Brown thrashers, like tiny hawks with their spotted breasts and sharp yellow eyes, flitted away under the ficus hedge as I reached the door to Cal's workroom, and I smiled at the sound of him singing along with the Eagles.

“Hey,” I said, stepping over the raised metal threshold. He smiled over a boat engine, his forehead lightly slicked with sweat. “You should have woken me.”

“Ah, I figured I'd worn you out last night. It was only fair of me to let you sleep.”

“The kids get off okay? Did they take something to eat?”

“I gave them a few bananas and fifty bucks. They said they were going to stop at the store.”

“That was generous of you.”

He shrugged. “Don't want him to run out of gas again.”

“Oh, Cal, you didn't say that to him, did you?”

“No,” he said, drawing it out as he wiped his oily hands on a pink rag and came around the engine to plant a kiss on my cheek. “I'm keeping our deal in mind. How about you?”

“Well,” I said. “I watched the three of them leave the house last night long after midnight—”

“What?” he interrupted me, his hands still wrapped up in the rag. “You let Meghan go out in the middle of the night?”

“Not finished,” I teased him. He looked at me expectantly. “Of course not. They just hung out in the yard. Climbed up on the car, actually, but never got in it.”

“So spying on them out the window counts as letting them grow up? Hell, if I'd known that I'd have joined you with my binoculars.”

“I wasn't spying,” I protested. “I heard the door and looked to make sure they didn't drive off. I saw them lie down on the car and then I got back in bed. I fell asleep before I even heard them come back in.”

He appraised me thoughtfully and finally nodded his head. “Well, all right, Mom. Aren't we mature?”

“Aren't we though?” I grinned at him. “No, it—it feels good actually. I think. We've made the next step in parenting. This is what we're supposed to do, right?”

He sighed. “So I hear,” he said. “Never thought it would be this hard though. How you doing on Ada?”

I shrugged. “Meghan told me a little more about her last night. I don't know. They're young. Chances are Marshall is going to move on to someone else soon anyway. I suppose I'm getting worked up for nothing. What do you think? Do you think this is love? Temporary?”

“Who knows. You've always been closer to him than I have. I've tried talking to him about girls a few times before, but it always devolved into our same old thing.”

“Arguing religion.”

“Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it is love. Or maybe he just thinks it is.”

“Is there a difference?”

Cal looked at me in surprise. “Well, yes, there's a difference. Damn, Chloe. That's pretty cynical.”

I turned away from him, tears suddenly pricking my eyes. The tears didn't feel cynical. Had I turned cynical? And if I had, why was it a surprise to my husband? The same reason that Ada's appearance in our lives was a surprise to me, I supposed. I was too sure I knew Marshall.

I had touched every inch of his skin, wiped and cleaned and inspected places I had never, would never, touch on Cal. I thought I knew Marshall so well that it shocked and nearly confused me to consider hair anywhere on his body but his head. It was the great conceit of motherhood perhaps, that my having birthed, fed, and bathed him gave me never-ending access to his psyche.

Meghan had not pulled away from me yet. Had she? How long had it been since I had seen my daughter naked? Unselfconscious without clothing? And why did allowing them to grow up seem exhilarating until anything sexual came into the picture?

The surprises of motherhood seemed dubious gifts, at best. And the stages—I could no longer call them surprises—of marriage not only seemed dubious but . . . dangerous. A slick, long-grassed slope of dulled emotion, and yes, perhaps even cynicism.

And I cannot deny that the fact that it was a surprise to my husband was both depressing and yet oddly satisfying. I knew he wasn't paying attention. And didn't that just prove it?

I wandered over to Cal's workbench and picked up a wrench. It must have been twenty years old, its shank no longer shiny but lustrous. I tapped it against the side of the bench and then turned back to Cal with it in my hand, enjoying the slightly unbalanced weight of it.

“Think you could fix that screen door today?” I asked.

“I'll try to get to it,” he replied, gazing at me steadily.

I nodded and, tossing the wrench onto the bench with a clatter, left for my workroom.

Where I got little to nothing done. After the energy and noise of the previous night, the house now seemed too quiet, too still to support creativity. I mixed a green to replace some paint loss on a palm tree, but couldn't get the right shade. My black wasn't even, not usually a problem in the frequently less technically correct Highwaymen paintings, but this was a Harold Newton, and the man had known what he was doing with color.

I finally turned to the other Highwayman I was working on, a “fire sky,” filled with brilliant reds and yellows, almost absurdly lurid to anyone unused to southwest Florida's sunsets. I'd seen plenty of sunsets to rival the fire sky painting, and this time I got my colors right and was finally able to lose myself in my work. By the time I was ready for lunch, I'd worked my shoulders into satisfying knots and managed to replace my irritation with Cal with more pleasant remembrances of the previous night.

This, too, was one of those stages of marriage that nobody tells you about. Like the pain of childbirth fades, allowing us to do it again and again, eventually the time spent on petty resentments shortens, and we move from angry to settled in hours rather than days. Cal and I did anyway. My parents were gone too young for me to ask them about the intricacies of marriage, the secrets, if they had them, and the pitfalls.

And Calvin's parents were no example to turn to. According to him anyway. I'd never met his father, dead of a massive heart attack on their sofa when Cal was only sixteen, but his stories about him were both frightening and exhilarating, tales of impassioned sermons on the lure of the devil and the pain of the fiery pits of hell. Cal's brother, Randy, had been the quintessential preacher's kid, and was, the last time anyone had heard from him, evading warrants in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

Cal had removed himself entirely from the family the day he graduated from high school. We received occasional letters from his mother, her looping hand childlike, filled with misspellings, guilt-laden entreaties to visit her, and unselfconscious Bible references along with portents of doom and random news of obscure relatives.

Cal read these letters quickly, silently, occasionally allowed me to read them, and then threw them away. We did not discuss it, but I knew that he feared Marshall would read one and get intrigued, would possibly want to visit his grandmother, and would disappear into the bug-infested wilds of undeveloped Florida and spend his life convincing others that Satan was just a step behind them, waiting for the chance to claim their souls.

We'd taken him to visit once, when he was a toddler, at my insistence. Our first days there had been good, strained but polite. But once the initial busyness of food preparation and catching up on third cousins thrice removed was over, Cal and his mother seemed to deflate, as though all of their social niceties had simply leaked out, like so much air, and all that was left was the sour, stale remnant of a relationship long over. Their conversations, already terse, decreased in word count but increased exponentially in hidden meaning.

I watched, as one might watch snakes behind glass, certain of my safety but fascinated by the proximity to danger anyway. I did not miss a word, or a glance. I held Marshall while they jabbed at each other and vowed that I would never speak in riddles to my son.

She quoted Bible passages that seemed to be written specifically for her perceived lot in life, that of wronged mother, grievously harmed by the insensitivity and ungratefulness of her family. Cal countered with bits of Bible I'd never known he knew, all of it streaming from his mouth in a rounded, thickened accent I'd never heard.

My son and I were visiting with strangers.

Two days before we were to leave, we sat on the porch after dinner, eating homemade peach ice cream and listening to crickets, and it all ended. Marshall finished his ice cream and began to cry for more. He was up too late, and his cries rose fast and high in the air. Cal's mother stared hard at Marshall, his lips soft and red and still smeared with ice cream, and I saw her eyes narrow as she turned to Cal.

Ignoring me completely, she pointed her spoon at Marshall and said: “ ‘
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell
.' ”

Before I could even begin to make sense of this, Cal stood, his bowl clattering at his feet, and said, “That's it, we're done.” He strode past her and grasped me by the arm, pulling me from my chair as he scooped Marshall up in his other arm. Marshall's crying escalated to screaming, and though I pulled my arm from Cal's hand, I moved.