Stepping Into Sunlight (14 page)

I poured a mug of coffee and settled at the table, paging through my notebook. I’d been ducking conversations with my mom, hiding behind voice messages and e-mails. She’d love for me to call—just to let her know I was thinking of her. After a deep breath, I punched in the number.

She answered on the second ring with a harried, “Hello.”

I held my cup near my face fortifying myself with the smell of the steam. “Hi, Mom.”

“Penny? Is it really you? I thought you never had time for the phone anymore.”

I clenched my teeth and took a slow breath through my nose. “How’s it going? How’s Cindy doing?”

“Esther has colic. Cindy’s worn out. I’m on my way over there now. And then I have a dentist appointment. You know, I thought things would slow down when I retired, but I’m always running. Oh, and the chamber of commerce meeting is tonight, and I promised to bring refreshments. They love my chocolate oatmeal bars. So you’ve been too busy to call all week?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Her tone softened. “Are you managing okay without Tom? I have a hard time when your dad takes a fishing trip for a week. I honestly don’t know how you’re going to last three whole months.”

I felt a glimmer of warmth, a connection. How far could I build on this hint of understanding? Intimacy was a gift, and I wanted to offer my mom a gift today, the way the support group on Tuesday had given their honesty to me. “It’s hard. I’ve been kind of . . . down.”

Awkward pause. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been tired all the time. I thought it was a flu bug, but it’s more than that. I’m having trouble doing things. . . . I’m just . . . kind of not myself.” The words slipped out like minnows and darted away.

She scooped them up. “You know what I always say. If you’re down in the dumps, give the house a good cleaning. That’ll cheer you right up.”

“Yep. That’s what you always say.”

“My friend Janice was feeling blue last month and I told her all she needed was to get busy. Listen to happy music. Open the curtains. Try a little harder.”

On the page with my mother’s name, I doodled into my notebook.
Happy music, curtains, try harder
. My shoulders sagged. “You’re probably right.”

“You know it.” The compassion I’d imagined disappeared behind the crisp commands of a drill sergeant. “Nobody likes a whiner. Besides, you have Bryan to keep you company and cheer you up. How is my darling grandson, anyway?”

I took my cue and brightly filled her in on Bryan’s progress in school, his friends, and his upcoming play. After a little more chatting, I hung up and rested my head in my arms. This good deed had been more exhausting than helping Laura-Beth.

A month ago I might have spouted the same pep talk. I’d never had much patience with people moping through life and giving in to their moods. But that was before I’d felt the fierce power of a turbulent mind—the power to disrupt everything. Eating, sleeping, talking.

Alex had tried to tell me once. I hadn’t understood. Hadn’t tried to understand. Had my brother felt this? These fractures through the landscape of the brain? Had I tossed him the same thoughtless Band-Aids in the face of aching wounds?

A warm, grassy breeze slipped through the open kitchen window and lured me back to another summer day twenty years earlier.

“Don’t tell me you understand!” Alex shouted the words with such force that spittle flew through the air. The tranquil wooden porch in front of our house couldn’t offer him comfort. He didn’t seem to see the towering oak tree with our old tire swing, or the broad lawn bright with clover and Creeping Charlie. He clutched his hair, shaking his head like a horse fighting a curb bit. “It’s like ants crawling in my head, faster and faster.”

Alex’s depression of the past months had annoyed me. I was fourteen and clawing for some measure of popularity at the high school—I didn’t need my seventeen-year-old brother moping around. His new descent into desperation terrified me. “Let me get Mom. She can call your doctor.”

“It’s not helping. Mom keeps telling me to try harder. And the doctors just talk and talk.”

He sprang to his feet and ran into the house. The screen door slapped shut behind him.

Funny that after all these years, that sound remained a vivid memory.

Oh, Alex, I didn’t understand. I thought you were demanding more
than your fair share of attention. I thought that since it left no physical
marks on you, the depression couldn’t be all that bad.

Of course, the physical marks on my brother came later. Sunken, haunted eyes, weight gain from yet another medication that didn’t work, pale skin as he withdrew from life. Immersed in my own adolescent selfishness, I’d resented all the trouble he was causing our family. Cindy had been young and oblivious, but I’d chafed against the way his mental illness disrupted my life.

At school, whispers stopped suddenly when I walked to my locker. I couldn’t bring friends over. I missed pep band performances when my dad picked me up from school early because they had to take Alex to the hospital again.

Alone at my kitchen table so many years later, grief poured over me, and I begged the memories to carry me further back to happier times.

Alex had been the one to teach me to ride my bike. Dad was busy at the store the summer I was seven, and Mom couldn’t push a bike in her low-heeled pumps and tailored shirtdress. Appearance had always been vital to her, and jogging down the street of our small town with her scrape-kneed daughter shrieking from the bike seat was not on her priority list. Alex didn’t care who was watching. He owned the street. He owned the world. “Come on, Pen. Work those pedals!” I wobbled and tilted and flew. I could still hear his whoop of triumph as he let me go. I got all the way past the Olsons’ porch before tipping over.

Saturday morning I sat at the kitchen table again with my notebook, and stared out the screen door. The Penny’s Project idea had merit, but I needed some creative ideas before I ran out of the people I knew and had easy access to. Bryan was out back, swinging on a rope Tom had hung from a gnarled tree branch. His feet skimmed the tall grass as he experimented with different ways to dangle. Maybe I shouldn’t have resisted Tom’s repeated attempts to teach me to start the mower before he left. The grass had definitely gotten too long.

Since I didn’t have a goat, I really needed to tackle the problem. My budget was stretched thin because of all the ordering in I’d been doing, and the thought of interviewing neighbor kids to hire exhausted me.

I could figure out how to start a mower. How hard could it be? I pulled on my tennis shoes and pushed a gardening hat over my unruly hair. Mowing the lawn could be my good deed for the whole neighborhood and fill another day’s slot in my notebook.

The metal shed door shrieked in protest as I slid it open. A coiled hose snarled my ankle. When I kicked it free, I bumped a pile of tomato cages that tipped over and scraped my shins. I finally wrestled the small mower out to the lawn.

I’d seen Tom do this a hundred times. I studied the machine and found the string that he always yanked on. I gripped it and pulled. It refused to move.
Wait.
The grip bar at the handle must play a role. I squeezed and held it and pulled the string again.

Success. This time the string pulled out and curled back in.

But the engine didn’t start.

I rolled my shoulder a few times, got a firm hold on the string, and jerked hard.

A halfhearted sputter answered me from the mower. I let go and walked around the mower, studying it from every angle.

Bryan leapt from his swing with a thud and ran over to me. “Dad always pushes that button.” He pointed to a small black button on the body of the machine.

“Okay, buddy. Thanks.” I pushed it a few times, then gripped the handle, squeezed, and yanked the string. It took the coordination of a circus magician, but this time I achieved a throaty growl. I grinned at Bryan.

The growl died.

“Maybe it’s out of gas.” My son kicked the rusty red body of the machine.

“How can you tell?”

Bryan pointed to a cap on the side of the body. After a few minutes of wrestling I got it loose and peered into the dark innards of the tank. “I see something sloshing. I think. I can’t tell.”

“Here.” Bryan handed me a twig.

I dipped it into the tank and pulled it free, trying to look intelligent as I studied it. “Yep. I think it’s low. Well, so much for that idea.”

“Can I come with you to buy gas?”

I pushed the mower back to the shed. “I changed my mind. I’m not going to mow today.” I hunted through the shed and found some clippers. “But I can do some trimming.”

So I set to work along the edge of the fence between our yard and Laura-Beth’s. Then I hand-trimmed another six inches of the yard out from the fence. Our yard wasn’t too big. If I kept clipping, I wouldn’t need to go to the gas station to fill the gas can.

An hour later, I sank to the ground rubbing my aching back. Was I actually so desperate to avoid going to the gas station that I would try to cut my whole lawn with a pair of clippers? I wasn’t sure what the medical definition of crazy was these days, but I suspected this qualified.

“Is that how folks cut grass in Wisconsin?” Laura-Beth leaned on the chain-link fence. One of the twins held her frowzy skirt and sucked his thumb. The other toddled a short path back and forth like a caged tiger.

I dropped the clippers and pushed my sweaty hair off my forehead. “The lawn mower ran out of gas.”

She opened her mouth, and I knew what was coming. The obvious question.
What idiot doesn’t know how to go buy some gasoline?

“Hey, I think we’ve got some in our shed. Let me check.”

Minutes later Laura-Beth and her twins gathered to watch while I carefully poured gas into the mower. After a few tries, the motor started. Everyone cheered, including me.

“Can Bryan come over and play with Jim-Bob?” Laura-Beth yelled over the engine.

I nodded and they all cleared out and left me to my yard work.

That night I made a simple stir-fry for supper. Bryan waved his arms as he talked, even with his fork in his hand. By the time the meal was finished, rice littered the whole room, as if we’d hosted a wild wedding reception.

“Tomorrow is Sunday school, right?” Bryan looked up from hiding a broccoli spear under the edge of his plate.

Sunday already? I began picking up stray pieces of rice from the table, one by one. I couldn’t avoid it forever. Getting involved at the church was one of the goals in my notebook that I’d put off for too long. “Yep, I guess so.”

“Can I invite Jim-Bob?”

“Not this time. Okay, sport? Maybe some other time. It’s time for your bath.”

He gave me an arch look. “Know what? If I had a pet, it could take a bath with me. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“We’ll talk about it when your father gets home.”

I collapsed on the couch a few hours later. Bryan was asleep, the kitchen was picked up, and the quiet began to oppress me. I flicked on the television. Infomercial. News. Crass comedy show. Infomercial. Sports highlights.

I hauled myself off the couch and pawed through our small collection of movies on the shelf. The glint of the unlabeled DVD caught my eye.

No. Not yet.
There were still so many weeks before his return.

Instead I booted up the computer and typed an answer to Tom’s last e-mail.

Hey there, favorite husband.

Okay, I guess it makes sense that you planned to tell me about the
DVD if I didn’t mention finding it. But your plan was still risky. We
could have stuck it in a Netflix envelope and mailed it off by mistake.
Crazy man.

Guess what? I mowed the lawn today. Okay, stop laughing. With
this crazy warm weather, it was turning into a pasture, and I figured if
you could do it all these years, so could I. Yes, I should have let you train
me in, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out (with Bryan’s help).
But don’t worry about your job security around here. I’ll be happy to
relinquish the chore when you’re back.

I’m glad to hear you’ve finished your initial visits to each of the
crew at their stations. I know it must be hard to know if you’re making
a difference, but you are. How do I know? Because you make everyone
around you stronger.

Thanks for the blessing in your second message. And for telling
me you’re praying. Don’t worry. It didn’t sound like a platitude. It
helped.

I guess I can admit it has been a little hard to figure out where God
fits in all this. And not just the crime. The war, your deployment, the
other people who have had to deal with trauma. Raises a lot of questions.
But tomorrow Bryan and I will be going back to church. Maybe God
will whisper some answers to me.

Hurry back before you forget how to mow the lawn.

Inappropriate kisses, your favorite copper-top.

chapter
12

H
OPE
C
OMMUNITY
C
HURCH SAT
demurely in the center of a wide lawn. The simple, modern building held only a few hundred members. Yet to me it loomed huge; the number of people hurrying in from the parking lot seemed overwhelming.