Why the Sky Is Blue (4 page)

7

When I was still a child, I used to imagine that my father had not been killed in a war in Korea, but that he had just gotten lost there. I had a hard time imagining the place where he had been, and I actually had a hard time remembering him. I could not picture him or his surroundings in any colors except black and white. In fact, I could only picture him one way: immobile and in shades of gray, like the photograph of him. I had on my dresser.

I would mentally place him on a dusty road along a river’s edge, looking for his way home. His black and white body, face frozen in a careful grin, moved along the path in my mind like I moved my dolls across the floor of my room. Sometimes I pictured him stopping to rest or ask for directions. I often imagined him kissing me good night, bending over my bed with his black and white face. Even now I can only see my dad’s face in black and white.

I really only remember snatches of the day my father died, mere snapshots. I remember the morning I woke up with heavenly whispers in my ear. I remember Matt in his highchair, eating little rectangles of buttered toast; I can recall the picture window in our living room, the black car pulling into our driveway, and the man who looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad and who carried no duffel bag. I don’t remember our move from Los Angeles to Minnesota the week after my father’s funeral.

My next memories are of kindergarten in a Saint Cloud classroom, a broken wrist when I was six, and my lingering daydream that Daddy was lost somewhere in Korea.

Later I would learn that my dad had died just weeks before the war ended. This would explain much about why it took my mother so long to get over his death. It seemed so terribly unfair. Another few weeks and he would have been on his way home. And she was deeply in love with him. It would be nearly fourteen years before she would even look at another man.

My father died in May 1953, and the Korean War ended in July. There was talk of an armistice in the months before he died, but nothing had been settled. My dad was part of a strategy to bomb irrigation dams so that floodwaters would destroy critical rail and road networks. His bomber was shot down on this maneuver, though all the dams were successfully destroyed. I suppose that’s why I always pictured him near water when I imagined him trying to find his way home.

In Minnesota we lived with my mother’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Gene. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Gene lived in a suburb of Saint Cloud, in an older house in need of repair but sprawling with extra rooms. Uncle Gene worked part-time for a company that made hoses and fittings, but he and Aunt Elizabeth spent most of their waking hours caring for kids in need of a safe place to live for short periods of time. They were foster parents for the county we lived in but only took kids for the short-term— until a permanent home could be found or conditions at their own homes improved.

Matt and I grew up in that house with dozens of foster kids, none of whom stayed longer than a few months. Aunt Elizabeth always cried when they left, and Uncle Gene always told her they would remember her for the rest of their lives. I learned early not to get too attached to any of them, especially the girls, because they always left.

For quite some time I thought my mother had been amazingly composed during our move. I pictured her summoning a quiet strength from within and then bravely selling our house in California and moving with her two youngsters to Minnesota, a place where she had never lived before.

Actually, my mother was close to being hospitalized because of the intensity of her grief. It was Gene and Elizabeth who took care of everything, including the sale of our house, the move, and getting us settled in the third story of their house.

In hindsight, I suppose it was the best thing for us. My grandparents on my father’s side had offered to take us in too, but they were also awash in grief. And they lived on a farm in Kansas with no neighbors for several miles. That thought alone scared my mother, I’m sure. My mother’s parents, who lived several hours away in Fresno, offered to find us an apartment close to them, but they were going through a tough time of their own. A few years later they divorced.

I guess I don’t have any regrets about leaving California and growing up instead in Minnesota, but I wondered, and still do, how my life would have been different if we had stayed in California.

My mom had no professional skills, though she was an avid reader and knew something about just about everything. For nearly a year after our move, however, she read nothing except the Psalms. Then, a few days before the first anniversary of my father’s death, she began reading other things again. She started bringing books home from the library. Lots of them. I don’t remember this; I was only five. But I know she was still doing it when I was seven, when she started taking me to the library with her. And then she brought Matt. Then she started bringing the foster kids. We would all come home with piles of books. In the evenings we would lose ourselves in the pages of every kind of book imaginable. Sometimes my mother would read aloud to Matt and me and as many as five foster kids. Other times she would pull me into her lap and read to me alone. And sometimes she would pull me into her lap and she would read her book and I would read mine.

Most people would later attribute my choice to become a teacher, especially a high-school literature teacher, to my mother and her devotion to books. And in some ways that’s true. But the older I became, the more I realized she and I devoured books for the same reason. Not for entertainment or even enlightenment. It was for escape. She dealt with the loss of her husband and her own home by escaping into books, and I dealt with the loss of my father and that same home the same way.

Not that there was anything wrong with medicating ourselves with books, but I think knowing it made it seem less a weakness and more like a comfort.

My mother always read more than one book at a time. There were usually five or six on her bedside table or on the coffee table in the living room. Each one was bookmarked, most of the time with coupons for things we didn’t use, like cat food, baby powder, and denture cleaner. The books were never about the same thing. One book might be a biography; another, about the Civil War; another, a classic by Dickens or one of the Bronte sisters; and another, the current bestseller. She usually had a Bible nearby, also bookmarked, but never with a coupon. And there was never more than one bookmark in any of her Bibles.

Mom is the only person I know who reads the Bible cover to cover. She never decides to read Romans or start a study of Ecclesiastes. She always reads it from page one in Genesis to the last page in the Revelation of John. Sometimes reading it takes her six months; sometimes, a year; sometimes, two years. I wouldn’t call my mother a religious person, though I know others do. She has what I call a simple faith in a God who is both powerful and personal. Apparently my dad had the same kind of uncomplicated faith.

She told me once that of all the books she has ever read, she has found the Bible to be the most spectacular book ever written. I suppose she approaches it like it is great literature, in addition to being the Creator’s inspired word, and that’s why she has always read it from beginning to end. It surprised me, then, to learn that when she was grieving for my father, she read only the Psalms. She told me this when I was eleven.

“I wasn’t actually reading them,” she said when I asked her why. “I was praying them.”

I told her I didn’t understand what she meant.

She told me that because she was so sad, she couldn’t pray her usual way but felt a crushing need to pour out her heart to God. She told me she had to keep talking to him so that she wouldn’t start to blame him for what happened. So she read the Psalms for a whole year, and they were her prayers.

I remember asking her if it worked. “You never blamed God for what happened?” I said when she asked me what I meant by “worked.”

She considered my question for a moment, no doubt weighing its significance to my blossoming understanding of God.

“I know God could have stopped it from happening,” she said. “He could have kept Daddy safe that day, like he had all the other days of the war. But it was war. We knew he was in danger. The world is not a safe place, Claire; only heaven is. This is not heaven. And we cannot expect it to be like it.”

Then she told me something that I found utterly remarkable.

“If God had come to me before I met your daddy and told me I was going to marry a wonderful man who would love me completely, that we would have two precious, beautiful children, that I would experience unequaled joy, but that this good man would be taken from me after only eight years, I would have told him I still want to meet that man; I still want to marry him.”

“Why?” I had asked.

“Because,” she said, drawing me close. “When I look at you and Matthew, I know I would have wanted God to change nothing.”

I was amazed at her insight and awed by her love for Matthew and me.

“But you were so sad when Daddy died.”

“I missed him so much, Claire,” she said. “And I still do. And it’s okay for us to miss him.”

“But don’t you wonder why God let it happen?” I asked.

Again, I can remember her taking her time choosing what she would say next. I would remember her next words always.

“For a long time I did want to know why,” she finally said. “It seemed to me I deserved an answer. Your daddy was a good man and a good father. And he loved God. But deep down, I knew that sometimes God’s reasons for doing things or not doing things are as deep as his character. Being supplied with a reason when maybe I wouldn’t have been able to understand it might have made it worse for me.”

She drew me even closer and cuddled me so that my head rested in the special place between her neck and chin. “Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.”

I never looked at the sky the same way after that. There would be many times over the course of my life when I would wonder what in the world God was up to. Sometimes I would look at the abused, neglected, and unloved children that found their way to my aunt and uncle’s house and wonder if God saw their pain, why he did nothing. I asked my uncle this once, and he said, “Why, Claire, he’s brought them here to us,” like it was the easiest thing in the world to see.

But I knew there were many other kids who had no safe place to go to escape suffering. It didn’t seem fair, and I knew what I really wanted was a heaven on earth, where no one suffered at all. Ever. But after that day, whenever I wrestled with why people suffered, I always thought of my mother and the sky, and I learned to comfort myself with the knowledge that when the question is complex, the answer is too. I learned to be at peace with a sky that is blue for no given reason at all.

In the coming months people would assume this was the question that troubled me most: Why? Why had God let this happen to me? Well-meaning friends would feel compelled to say, “We know God has a reason for everything,” or “God must have a wonderful purpose for allowing this to happen.” And while I didn’t doubt their sincerity, I did wonder if they had stopped to think before they spoke. Obviously they had never stopped to consider if God had a wonderful and good reason for making the sky blue instead of red.

I wasn’t overly perplexed by the “why.” What awoke me in the middle of the night, disrupted my thoughts when I tried to read a bedtime story to Spence, and haunted my quiet moments alone in the house was the “what.”

What was to become of my marriage, my family, and me when this was over? What would I be like at the end of the journey? What would I see in the mirror a year, two years, ten years from now? What did I want to see? Those were the questions for which there did not seem to be any answers.

8

The next few days felt like I was preparing for a long trip, like I was organizing my affairs for a long journey, and time was of the essence. For the first time since I got home from the hospital, I began to set my alarm so I would be up before the kids, up even before Dan. The first ten minutes of my day I spent hugging the toilet in the master bathroom until the morning sickness subsided. It was how I oriented myself to the reality of each new day. The morning sickness daily reminded me of what was in store for me, and after I threw up and showered, I read the Psalms. I even set my alarm on Saturday, so that I would be through with the morning bathroom routine before anyone else was awake.

The kids were thrilled to have me back in their morning routine, and Spence told me—after the first day—that he didn’t even mind that I made peanut butter and jelly for his lunch when he told me back in August that he was tired of it. I began taking Katie, Spencer, plus Nick and Becky’s twin boys to school again in the mornings. Becky insisted she bring them home since that had been our previous arrangement. I started to pay the bills again and do the grocery shopping and run errands.

Dan was pensive about my “jumping back into things,” as he liked to call it. He made me promise to call Patty and get her opinion on my resuming day-to-day responsibilities. He didn’t ask me to tell her about the pregnancy, though, which surprised me, because that very thing was what had motivated me to reclaim—as much as possible—my normal life.

I called the superintendent of the high school where I had been teaching and told him I had a letter for the school board asking if I might have an extended leave of absence due to medical reasons. He was very understanding. He assured me that surviving a violent attack on my life was more than sufficient cause for a year’s leave. He told me to send him the letter and not to worry a moment over it. So I did.

I attended a church service for the first time since the attack the following Sunday, wearing a favorite turtleneck so that the pale yellow bruising on my neck wouldn’t startle anyone. People were genuinely glad to see me, several hugged me with tears in their eyes, and I wondered how much Nick had told them. The police had been careful to keep my name out of the papers and news reports, but many of these people were friends, and I’m sure they knew the unnamed woman abducted from a mall parking lot, assaulted, nearly strangled, and left for dead, was me.

That same Sunday afternoon, my mother called and again offered to come out. This time without Stuart.

“No, Mom,” I pleaded. “I wouldn’t have you do that to Stu.”

“He’s okay about it,” she insisted.

“But I’m not,” I said. “I want you both to come. At Thanksgiving. Like we had planned.”

“What about your coming out here for a few days? Did you and Dan talk about it?”

We had. Dan didn’t seem to mind, but I knew he was wondering what Patty would want me to do. Or what Nick would suggest. He was afraid to trust any gut feeling of his own. I imagine he was still blaming himself for not going with me the night I went to the mall. I also wondered if he’d had some sort of feeling before I went that night that I would be better off if he came and had shrugged off the hunch. But of course I couldn’t ask him that. “We’re still trying to decide, Mom,” I said.

“Matthew really wants to see you,” she added.

We ended up leaving it that I would let her know by the next Sunday. It was actually Thursday that I called her back and told her I was coming.

It wasn’t a horrible week, but it was one that left me feeling like a fish out of water. On Monday, after the kids left for school, Dan had left for work, and the security system was properly switched on, I began to feel a compulsion to clean. Part of me was at a loss as to what to do with myself with a Monday morning all to myself with no kids, no students, and no husband to occupy my time. The other part of me was still grappling with the enormity of the situation facing me. It wasn’t the first time in my life I had cleaned instead of pacing the floor in frustration.

I started with the bathrooms, then moved on to the linen closet. Next, I attacked a hall closet simply known to everyone in the house as my closet. In it I kept dozens of boxes of things that were either precious to me or that I had been unable to throw away. The kids’ first shoes, their baby books, and boxes of their artwork were in there, as was the top from my wedding cake, letters my dad wrote to my mom from Korea, and my set of first-edition Nancy Drew books. But there were also notes from all my college courses, past issues of cooking magazines, and several boxes of old Christmas cards.

I didn’t know why I had kept the cards, but I had—for the past eight years. Each bundle contained dozens of old cards that I hadn’t looked at since the day I had gathered them up and tied them up with used gift ribbon. Nor did I have a reason for suddenly deciding that keeping them was utter nonsense, but it just struck me what a waste of time and energy it was to hang on to them. I sat down on the floor, pulled out the boxes, and untied the ribbons. I opened each card and checked for a photo. If there was one, I set it aside to keep it. The cards, including any outdated Christmas letters, went into a garbage bag.

Dan decided to come home for lunch that day and found me fully engrossed in this task. He came up the stairs and, his surprise evident, surveyed the scene, mouth kind of open, eyes taking it all in. Finally he said, “Claire, what are you doing?”

It seemed pretty obvious to me what I was doing, and it annoyed me that he asked.

“I’m throwing these out,” I said, trying not to sound flippant.

“Why?” he said, incredulous.

“Because I don’t want them anymore,” I answered, tossing a few cards from five years before into the trash bag.

He again studied my project—assessing it, evaluating me.

“But you’ve had these for years,” he said, his voice softening a little.

“I know,” I replied, in a gentler tone as well. “But I don’t want them anymore.”

He was silent for a moment, and as I reached for the bundle of 1981 Christmas cards, he knelt beside me and touched my shoulder.

“Honey,” he said, in a different tone of voice altogether. “I really don’t think this is a good time to throw stuff out that you’ve kept for years.”

“But they’re just old Christmas cards,” I said, and then I giggled, which was a huge mistake because I saw a wave of worry rush over Dan’s face.

But I couldn’t help it. He had said that very same thing to me about a year earlier when
he
wanted to throw the cards out. He had even said it the same way. I thought it was funny that he and I were having the same conversation in reversed roles.

My ill-timed giggle really threw him, though. I could see in his eyes that he was replaying in his mind the information Patty had given us about how assault victims deal with the trauma afterward. She had told both of us that mood swings and irrational behaviors were common. We could also expect me to have episodes of anxiety, even rage. Patty had told Dan to let me vent my own way as long as I didn’t hurt myself or anyone else. She also said some destructive behavior was common too. She thought it would be a great idea if we got a punching bag, just in case. We hadn’t even considered it. I could see Dan was now wishing we had. He was wishing he had come home to find me gloved and busily thrashing a therapist-approved punching bag instead of throwing out my precious, outdated Christmas cards.

“Dan, it’s not what you think,” I said reassuringly. “I’m not flipping out on you. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time.”

That was a lie. I had just thought of it that morning. I didn’t know why I said that. I guess it was to reassure Dan that I wasn’t having one of Patty’s predicted irrational moments. And maybe I was trying to convince myself of that too.

Dan let me continue with my campaign to rid the house of old Christmas cards, but contrary to what he told me, the garbage bag I had filled was not put out with the rest of the trash later that week. He hid it in the garage. I found it several weeks later.

He thought he was protecting me from a spontaneous decision that he assumed I would later regret, but finding that bag hurt me.

That emotional wound was nothing compared to finding a box of Katie’s and Spence’s earliest crayon drawings stashed in the back of Dan’s closet on the evening of the Christmas-card purge. That box had been in my hall closet. He had hidden it. From me.

Him thinking I was capable of tossing out Katie’s and Spencer’s masterpieces like they were old, forgotten Christmas cards was a blow took me several days to get over. Patty should have told me Dan would have some post-trauma of his own; that he also might exhibit irrational behavior. I was beginning to realize that the more I kept hidden from Dan, the less he would worry about me. He couldn’t handle knowing everything, and I couldn’t handle his worry.

Two days later I got a call from Mark Nordahl, the detective assigned to my case. He asked if Dan and I could come to the police station. There had been a new development. I was totally unprepared for this call and found myself shaking as I called the vet clinic and asked to speak to Dan. He cancelled a routine surgery, and we headed over to the police station just after lunch. We could think of nothing to say to each other on the drive over.

Detective Nordahl was a gentle and compassionate police officer. It always surprised me when he took off his coat to reveal his shoulder holster and the handle of the gun inside it. At the station the holster was always empty but it still seemed out of place for him. I couldn’t imagine him reaching for a gun, let alone aiming at or shooting someone. On the few occasions he came to the house, he left his coat on. If he reached for anything though, even a pencil on the coffee table, I would see that dark brown holster on his white-striped shirt, and I would also see that it wasn’t empty.

Detective Nordahl greeted us warmly but professionally when we got to the station and ushered us into a small conference room. After asking us if we wanted coffee, he dispensed with any more small talk, as was his custom, and got right down to business.

“Did you two happen to watch the news or read a newspaper this morning?” he asked.

Dan and I exchanged glances.

“No,” we both said.

“There was an attack the night before last not unlike yours, Mrs. Holland,” he said. “Same general location, same time of day, same M.O.”

Neither Dan nor I said a word. Dan reached for my hand and squeezed it.

The detective continued.

“The victim, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Carol Wells, was on her way home from the same mall as you, was travelling alone, and was found around midnight two blocks away from where you were found, with roughly the same injuries.”

“Is she okay?” I managed to say.

“Before I tell you anything else, I want you to know we got him,” Mark said. “I
know
we got him.”

“What are you saying?” Dan said.

“The man that killed this woman is the same man that attacked your wife, Mr. Holland. I am sure of it. And we got him.”

Killed this woman
.

I felt the room getting very warm. I asked for a glass of water. It was there in an instant.

“So, she died?” I finally asked.

Detective Nordahl nodded.

“Her husband has admitted to killing her,” he continued. “And he has admitted to assaulting a woman matching your description near the same mall on the night of September ninth. He never knew your name.”

“Why?” Dan was asking, but I was having a hard time concentrating on the conversation in the room. “Why did he do it?”

Detective Nordahl told us that Philip Wells had massive gambling debts and wanted to cash in on his wife’s million-dollar life-insurance policy. The first attack on me was meant to pave the way for the second attack and make it seem like a serial killer was on the loose. He made mistakes when he committed the second assault, however. He didn’t wipe the passenger door handle clean, and the blows to the head were made after his wife was already dead. He was very nervous when questioned about his own whereabouts at the time of his wife’s attack. The detective said he and the other officers became suspicious during questioning and asked him about his whereabouts on the night of September ninth. Wells broke down within minutes, the detective said, confessing to attacking me. He apparently also told them he was sorry for what he did to me and was relieved he had not killed me like he thought he had. So much for an apology.

“He is in custody, Mrs. Holland. We have his confession,” Detective Nordahl assured me. “Wells is not going anywhere.”

I just nodded my head. I liked it better when the attacker had no name.

Dan asked if he could take me home. The detective said if I wanted to see Wells in a lineup, it could be arranged in minutes, though he admitted he didn’t need me to identify Wells to put him away. Confessing to his wife’s murder was, thankfully, enough. I had no desire to see this man. I was content that I could not remember and had no yearning to go poking around looking for lost memories.

We were also told that Wells would likely get a life sentence.

“You will keep Claire’s name out of this?” Dan asked as we prepared to leave, and the detective said he would do his best.