Now and Again (4 page)

She must have been detained. The women of the parish were always coming up to her with ideas for the ladies' outreach, and the men were always coming up to her because even standing next to Tiff was its own reward. With less than sixty seconds left, he'd have to oust all bodily concerns himself. He could do it—Tiffany hadn't always been there to help him. They hadn't even celebrated their three-year anniversary.

Winslow finally said, “Okay, okay,” and backed out the door, leaving the pastor with the troublesome notion that his talk with Maggie hadn't seemed to resolve things. He had forty-five seconds to clear his mind. He closed his eyes. He kept a mental box for occasions like this. In his imagination, the box was made of inlaid precious materials like lapis lazuli and ivory and rare endangered woods from the Brazilian rain forest. Now he put his earthly concerns into the box so he could take them out again later. It was a beautiful box, but strong as steel, and once a worry had been locked inside, nothing could let it out again except the pastor himself. He was ready. The crescendo came. The flash of lights.

He didn't remember August Winslow or Maggie Rayburn until that evening over hot compote and potpie. “What does it mean,” he asked his wife, “that some of my own parishioners have heard the Truth and rejected it? What does it say about them, but more importantly, what does it say about me?”

“Not everything is about you, baby,” said Tiffany, and she was right. Hubris was an occupational hazard, and the pastor vowed to guard against it. But first, he had to reconnect his body to his spirit, and he needed Tiffany for that.

I
t was the information age, but Lyle Rayburn had been left behind by it. He had dropped out of school just before his fifteenth birthday, which had left him with deep insecurities about his ability to know or understand.

“I won't try to convince you,” Maggie told him. “I have my reasons, that's all.”

Lyle was happy to let silence do the work of words, to stare open-mouthed through the windshield and express his injury by lingering at the Main Street intersection long after the light had changed and the cars behind them had started to honk. It was Will who piped up from where he was pressed against the passenger-side door. “If you really wanted to make a difference, Mom, you'd have to convince other people. That's what they tell us in church. That we have to witness to other people if we want to be saved.”

“This isn't about saving myself,” said Maggie. “This is about saving other people. This is about doing the right thing.”

“But what makes you right and everybody else wrong? What if other people know something you don't?”

“Those are good questions. But if I had to have answers to everything, I'd never even get out of bed.”

“Are you sure you won't change your mind?” asked Lyle over the efficient sound of the turn signal and the crunch of gravel under the tires as they made the final turn toward the high school. “We can't afford to buy another car, and we'll need one if you're going off in some completely different direction every day.”

“I have the bicycle, and if I get the job at the prison, I can take the bus.”

“What if it rains?” Lyle wanted to know. And then he added gravely, “What if it snows?”

“I haven't worked out all the details yet,” said Maggie.

“Well, don't you think you should?” The closest Lyle ever came to getting angry was to suggest there was something that was not being done. He liked things to be squared away and he counted on Maggie to square them, even though he usually stopped short of assigning actual blame.

Lyle had known Maggie Sterling since before he had dropped out of school. He had been friends with her older brother and had taken to stopping by in the afternoons, not so much on the brother's account or even on Maggie's, but because of the rambling house where no shouting was allowed. “My mother is allergic to shouting,” Maggie's brother told him. “It literally makes her sick.”

Lyle, who thought he might be allergic to shouting too, started going there regularly to escape his own household, which was so full of siblings and cousins that Lyle was never missed. He took to showing up at dinnertime and standing at the screen door until the old flop-eared dog awoke from its nap and barked at him before going back to sleep or until one of the four Sterling children noticed him and let him in. He was careful not to let the screen door slam behind him, for when he did, Maggie's mother would scurry from the quiet depths of the house with an alarmed expression on her face and ask in a hoarse whisper what all the commotion was about.

Over the years, Lyle came to associate the comfortable chairs and steaming bowls of spaghetti with Maggie, and one day, instead of going to sit on the corner chair in the TV room after dinner, he had gone into the kitchen to help with the dishes, and Maggie had pushed her sister out of the way and said, “Isn't it your night to clear?” Their hands had bumped under the soapy water, and Maggie had splashed some bubbles into Lyle's hair. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” she had asked him.

“Niagara Falls,” replied Lyle without hesitation. He had heard about a man going over the falls inside a rubber ball named the Plunge-O-Sphere. It seemed like a crazy thing to do, but also brave, and the idea of doing something like that on purpose filled him with curiosity and dread. “What about you?” he asked Maggie.

“The Grand Canyon,” said Maggie. “I want to see what's inside the earth—what you'd find if you dug deep down.”

“I hear you can ride donkeys all the way to the bottom,” said Lyle.

“Donkeys!” cried Maggie, her eyes sparkling as if Lyle had said something shocking or funny or wise—he had never been sure which, but his heart soared to know he could have such an effect on her.

The answers to the travel game had changed over the years, and now it was Will who was apt to choose somewhere dangerous or impossible, while Maggie and Lyle were drawn to major cities and beach resorts. Now and then Lyle would catch Maggie's eye and say, “Where would you go?” not because he wanted an answer, but to remind her about how the game had started and about everything that had happened since. Six months after they first washed dishes together, Lyle dropped to his knees during a commercial break to ask her to marry him, and right in front of her gaping family, she said yes.

When they reached the school, Will clambered out of the car, grabbing his backpack and sack lunch out of the truck bed as he did five days out of seven. Also as usual, Maggie blew him a kiss good-bye and Will ignored her, hoisting the pack to his shoulders and hunching slightly under its weight. Now that Will had been safely delivered and he didn't have to concentrate so hard on the road, Lyle was able to glance across at Maggie, who still could melt his heart with a look.

“Oh, Lyle!” cried Maggie. “It's just that…” But instead of finishing her thought, she laughed, filling Lyle with the hope that his wife had been playing a practical joke on him or that she saw something he didn't see, and that if Lyle didn't see it now, he soon would—the way Maggie always heard the freight train coming before Lyle did, or said what he was thinking before he could find the words and get them out. “We're on the same wavelength,” they liked to say whenever that happened, but sometimes, lately, he wondered if they were.

I
haven't worked out all the details yet,” Maggie said again at dinner. Again she burst into laughter, partly because Lyle looked so sad and funny and partly because the crushing weight of indecision had finally lifted from her soul.

But Lyle only turned his face, still sagging with disbelief, toward Will, as if he might find the answer there. He bumped his glass up and down on the varnished tabletop and asked again, “Well, don't you think you should? Before certain actions are taken, I mean? Actions, I mean, that can't be taken back?”

Maggie had seen it many times before: Lyle's anger short-circuiting before it could gain steam and the passive voice pointing a vague finger while absolving everyone present from responsibility, because the minute he started to criticize someone else, he would be reminded of his own shortcomings, which invariably caused him to think, Who am I to say! Sometimes he said it out loud: “Who am I to say!” On those occasions Maggie would stroke his hair and croon, “You have as much right as anyone, honeybun.” Humility was one of the things she had always loved about her husband, but now all she felt was irritation. “If your car was headed at a crowded sidewalk, you wouldn't work out all the details before you turned the wheel!” she exclaimed.

But Lyle said thoughtfully that yes, he would. “There'd be no sense turning it toward a more crowded sidewalk, now, would there?”

He laid his heavy hands on the table and examined his fingernails, which were dirty and chipped. Maggie had never before noticed how blocky his hands were, how his fingers were all nearly the same length, as if they had been cut from the same chunk of wood as the table and never properly shaped. “If I was headed toward the sidewalk outside the Multiplex on a Saturday, I'd turn the wheel toward the Merry Maid, but if I was on Main Street during the homecoming parade…”

“You wouldn't aim it at a more crowded sidewalk!” said Maggie impatiently. “You'd aim it at a less crowded one!”

“Exactly which sidewalk are we talking about?”

Lyle was like one of the heavy hand trucks they used to move ordnance at the plant—slow moving and hard to turn. Maggie could tell from his expression that he was trying to come up with some way to justify doing nothing, some way to put himself in the passenger seat and so be absolved of having to steer. She tried to catch Will's eye the way Will always caught hers when the subject of the conversation was Will. The boy was poking at his uneaten vegetables when, suddenly, he came out with a justification of his own. “It's the lesser of two evils,” he said slowly, looking up from under his pale eyebrows at his dad.

Maggie swelled with pride in her first and only born. How many times had she stuck up for Will to Lyle or the teachers at the school? And now, just when she needed him, Will was sticking up for her. “You see!” she crowed. “Will knows what I'm talking about!”

But Will surprised her again by saying, “I'm not talking about the crowded sidewalk. I'm talking about the munitions plant. I'm talking about guns and even about killing people. That's the thing that's the lesser of two evils. Do you really want us to wait for the terrorists to use their weapons on us?”

“Lesser evils—” began Maggie, but for the first time in many years, the proper words came to Lyle before they came to her.

“I think your mother just wants to do something she can believe in,” he said.

But that wasn't quite it either—there was more to it than that.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Maggie took one of the Internet articles out of the dresser drawer where she kept a brown accordion file of what she had begun to think of as her evidence and showed it to Will and Lyle. “I wanted you to see this,” she said, spreading the printouts on the table, and to Will she added, “I think you're old enough.”

“They haven't proved the birth defects are caused by the depleted uranium, have they?” asked Will, so Maggie showed him a newspaper article about the strange freaks of nature being spawned in their own backyard.

“There are frogs with eight legs!” she whispered, sounding exactly like her own mother, who had taken to whispering after Maggie's father had left, as if that would somehow cancel out the years of arguments and shouting.

Will offered up a scientific theorem about causation and correlation. “Not to mention reverse causation and coincidence. Umbrellas don't make it rain,” he said.

Lyle nodded his head and said, “Tell me something I don't know,” as if Will had taken the words right out of his mouth. Lyle was always saying “tell me something I don't know” the way Pastor Price said “don't get me wrong” and Misty Mills said “no offense,” but for Lyle, the phrase was a way to avoid having to comment on subjects he knew nothing about.

“Oh, Lyle!” cried Maggie in frustration.

“We're only saying that you don't have all the facts,” said Will.

“Who in tarnation does?” asked Maggie. “What does anyone base a decision on? Partial knowledge, that's what.” She had practiced the line, but now it sounded flat and inadequate. Even Lyle could poke holes in it.

“That's what we have experts for,” he said.

Of course other people knew more than Maggie did, but that didn't absolve her. “That doesn't absolve me,” she said. “I have a duty to act.” She wanted to add something about wisdom, about how it didn't always depend on facts. She wanted to say that the more facts people knew, the more they were blinded by them, but Lyle interrupted her.

“Lay off, Will,” said Lyle. “Can't you see your mother's upset?”

This only increased Maggie's aggravation. Her family was allied against her, both coddling her and making a joke of her determination. It was as if Lyle had grabbed on to her sleeve and was pulling her back from an important edge.

Maggie had shown Lyle and Will the newspaper article, but she didn't show them the document she had taken from Mr. Winslow's desk that remained hidden in a separate folder at the very bottom of the evidence pile. She didn't even like to think of it, yellowing there beneath her sweaters and flannel nightshirts, yellowing except for the crimson border and the threatening red letters marching across the top of the page—and tucked just inside the cover, the letter from the Department of Defense.

Tucked inside the folder too was the letter from Dolly Jackson describing her experiences as a midwife at a women's clinic and asking Maggie if she had ever come across evidence that the munitions produced at the plant were making people sick, and if she had, could she copy it and send it on. Maggie hadn't bothered to write back saying she hadn't and she wouldn't—of course she wouldn't take something that wasn't hers! But she had. She had, and now she had to do something with the evidence—evidence that was more like ammunition than she liked to think.