Rapture Practice (31 page)

“The Lord was merciful,” Mom says softly.

The wreck when the drunk driver hit us in sixth grade comes flooding back to me now. The impact, the slow-motion float of the station wagon, the blood on Miriam’s cheek and Caleb’s forehead, and something else:

Mom’s beautiful soprano, singing.

After the car skidded to a stop and Josh had taken off his shirt to stanch the flow from Caleb’s forehead, as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, Mom had said, “Let’s sing.”

Jesus I am resting, resting

In the joy of what Thou art

I am finding out the greatness

Of thy loving heart.

Maybe this is where the calmness I feel now comes from. Mom has always been great in a crisis. I realize she’s taught me how to handle emergencies with grace—and a song.

Songs! My tapes!

While Mom is still talking to the paramedics about Josh’s eye, I grab my secret box of cassette tapes from under the seat of the totaled Toyota and stash them beneath the seat in her car.

As I traipse along the shoulder of the road picking up the items that were flung from the car, I can’t help remembering the story about Mom’s friend from high school who got shot while he was hitchhiking. Was this a message from God? A sign? A warning to straighten up? To quit drinking? Bradley has been in Iowa for six weeks. Since then I’ve had a beer out of the fridge Megan’s dad keeps stocked in their breezeway, but other than that there are no parties planned until Bradley comes back for Thanksgiving.

Soon the tow truck has dragged away the wreckage, and
we are headed home. When I walk through the front door, I head into the living room and stare at the needlepoint hanging in the corner. I say a silent prayer, a prayer thanking God for keeping me alive, and promising to straighten up if he continues to, but as soon as I say “amen,” guilt begins to pool in my stomach.

The God who is part of my roots knows everything. He knows I’m just bargaining. “No drinking” for a “get-out-of-wreck-free card” seems silly. I may be able to fool Mom and Dad, but how could I fool God? The things my parents have taught me to believe seem to make less and less sense to me, and all at once the idea of roots and wings seems at odds with each other. What good are wings if your roots won’t let you off the ground?

Mom calls us all to the table for dinner, and I walk into the kitchen wondering how I’ll ever fly very far at all.

“That poster really looks like you!”

Jacob has flown back from Stanford for the weekend to see his little brother in the school play. I got the lead this year, and Jacob is genuinely impressed that Mrs. Hastings had an artist draw my likeness on the posters for her new musical about the life of Joseph.

“When my mom told me they were doing
Joseph
for the school musical, I almost fell over,” he says, laughing.

“Yeah, our Joseph is not of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat variety,” I say.

“Can you imagine if Tri-City did the Andrew Lloyd Webber
Joseph
?” he asks. “All those shirtless slaves, and you in hot pants.”

“I think the building would fall down and crush us. It would wind up being more like a musical about Samson.”

We are sitting in IHOP at midnight on Friday. I’m spending the night at Jacob’s tonight. His family falls somewhere between Bradley’s and mine on the Christian school continuum. There’s no beer or Absolut at his place, but plenty of movies in the family room. After the play, we had watched
The Terminator
and
Terminator 2
, then decided we had to get some food.

“You were really great in the show, by the way. How many more performances do you have?”

“One more tomorrow night.”

“Big plans for the holidays?” he asks.

“We’re going to Memphis, like we always do.” Papa Davis is losing his battle with emphysema. No one is sure how much more time he has, but Nanny says this will be his last Christmas with us.

“You okay?” Jacob asks as the waitress places a cheeseburger in front of him and a turkey club in front of me.

“Yeah. A little sad about my grandfather,” I say. “He’s not doing very well.”

Our conversation turns to Jacob’s plan to finish his degree,
then join the armed forces as an officer so the military will pay for him to go to grad school.

“I’ll be able to retire in twenty years with a pension,” he says, “and they’ll pay for everything.”

Talking about a pension as a sophomore in college strikes me as strange—almost like having a death wish. I suppose I understand putting things in order for the future, but I don’t want to think like that. It feels like Jacob is planning to be an old man before he’s even out of college.

I’ve never really imagined my life past twenty-five. If I try hard, I can imagine myself living in Los Angeles, in a cool apartment. I have furniture with clean lines and no floral prints. There is art on the walls, and I have a martini set on the bar, but the rest of the details are hazy.

Jacob asks about my college plans, and I tell him I’m probably headed to the Bible college across town to get my first year out of the way.

“After that, I’m not sure,” I say.

“What do you want to major in?” he asks.

“I want to be an actor, but I also want to get a music major,” I say. “I want to keep playing the piano.”

“How are you going to make money?” he asks.

“I want to be on TV,” I say. “Or do musicals on Broadway.”

“Do you have a Plan B?” he asks. “In case that doesn’t work out?”

I like Jacob, but something about this question bugs me. “I’m not going to plan for it not to work out,” I say. “I don’t
know exactly what my life will look like in twenty years. I think I’m good at lots of things. I’m going to carve my own niche.”

He smiles at me, and nods. “Just make sure your niche has a salary expectation.”

I suddenly wish I could go to Stanford. I wish I could fly to California on the next plane out with Jacob. The idea of going to the Bible college feels easy, but it doesn’t get me any closer to where I want to be. Jacob’s green eyes light up when he talks about college. He wears preppy suede Bass shoes and V-neck sweaters.

How did you get to Stanford?
I wonder.
And how am I going to get out of here?

“The deer ran into me!”

“Aaron, how is that even
possible
?” Daphne is laughing so hard she can barely drink her chocolate malt at Winstead’s. Both of our schools are out for Christmas break, and it feels good to be done with finals.

“I’m just telling you what happened. I wasn’t even going that fast.”

“And a deer appeared out of nowhere to commit suicide against your car?”

I nod. “It was terrible. And it’s the second accident I’ve had this year.”

“Well, the dent didn’t look that bad when you picked me up,” Daphne says. “At least you can still drive the car this time.”

She makes a good point. Bradley got back from the University of Iowa last night, and Jacob got back from Stanford this morning. Both of them called me and said the same thing: “Let’s party.” Plans are under way for a New Year’s Eve celebration that will be remembered by future generations as the stuff of legend. Mom and Dad have decided I can go. They think I will be ringing in the New Year playing board games with nonexistent members of the youth group Bradley does not attend at the Westmans’ fictional church.

“How’s Megan?” asks Daphne. “It was good to see her last week at the basketball tournament.”

“Skiing with her family in Colorado.”

“She’s quite the little athlete, isn’t she?”

“I think she’s an adrenaline junkie. She was last seen wearing a T-shirt that read
FASTER, FASTER, FASTER, UNTIL THE THRILL OF SPEED OVERCOMES THE FEAR OF DEATH
.”

“She certainly has moved in on you pretty quickly.” Daphne smirks. “How is it going with her, anyway?”

I blush in spite of myself. “She’s… fun.” I never know how to answer Daphne’s questions about girls. I can talk to her about Jacob and Bradley until her ears bleed, but for some reason, I clam up on the subject of Megan.

Daphne shakes her head, and waves her straw in a circle, indicating my general vicinity. “Trouble,” she says. “You are nothing but trouble.”

I’m the first to notice that Dad isn’t driving our van toward home after church on Sunday afternoon.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“Stay in the buggy and find out.” He grins from the driver’s seat, and Mom lets out an excited giggle next to him.

“Ho, ho, ho!” she says, her eyes shining brightly. “It’s a merry Christmas surprise!”

Mom is not making a joke. She’s genuinely delighted. She says things like “merry Christmas surprise” all the time. Christmas is not a joke to her. When it comes to celebrating Jesus’s birth, she’s a professional, right down to the decorations.

Every January as Mom packs away the decorations from the previous year’s festivities, she takes an exhaustive inventory of every single lightbulb, icicle, green wreath, scrap of tinsel, and ornament hook that needs to be replaced for next year. The items she can’t find on holiday clearance at Walmart or Target are very carefully logged on a single four-by-six index card, which is then fastidiously paper-clipped to the November page of the calendar for the new year that hangs on the inside of the cabinet door in the kitchen. The next year, on October 31, before going to bed, she flips that calendar page and her holiday decorating list is ready to go.

There are always surprises at Christmastime. Mom makes sure of that. It’s one of the things I love about her. Both she and Dad are tireless surprise planners. They want
to make sure we know we’re loved—not because they say it, or hug us, or kiss us, all of which happens often. They want us to
experience
it. They want us to see their love in action.

Today, that action takes the form of a “merry Christmas surprise”: tickets to the Missouri Repertory Theatre, the biggest professional theater in Kansas City. Mom and Dad have a savings account they’ve been trying to fill for a while now to replace the living room furniture, but they tend to break down and spend it on cultural events for us, especially around Christmastime. Last year it was
The Nutcracker
at the Kansas City Ballet, this year it’s Missouri Rep’s annual production of
A Christmas Carol
. The Rep is a beautiful theater, and I’ve been here for events before, but as I watch Jacob Marley pop through the floor of the stage in chains and beg Ebenezer Scrooge to reconsider his miserly ways, I realize there are teenagers onstage in the opening scene, and a thought crosses my mind:

I should be one of them.

As we leave the show, I stare up at the banners hanging from the ceiling of the theater lobby. Each one bears the name of a different play or musical that will be performed this season:
Death of a Salesman. The Fantasticks. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I make a conscious pledge to myself:
The next time you come back to this theater, it’s going to be for an audition.

It’s getting dark by the time the matinee ends, and Dad takes us to see the Christmas lights at the Country Club Plaza, an outdoor shopping center not far from the Carriage
Club. The man who developed most of Kansas City was named J. C. Nichols and he backpacked through Europe when he was twenty-one. Upon his return to the Midwest, he developed huge swaths of Kansas City with buildings in the style of the neighborhoods he’d seen in Europe.