Heat and Light (23 page)

P
astor Jess is wearing perfume. Shelby smells it the instant she walks in the door. The synthetic floweriness makes her eyes itch, but she keeps quiet. Though she would like to, she can't exactly scold the pastor for what she wears in her own house.

“Excuse the mess,” says the pastor. “I wasn't expecting you until seven.”

In fact the house isn't messy. Except for two empty wineglasses on the coffee table, Shelby sees nothing out of place.

“Oh, I'm early! Sorry,” says Shelby, though she isn't. She came early on purpose, hoping for an extra fifteen minutes. Always the hour passes far too quickly, and this week has been particularly eventful. She fears running out of time.

They go downstairs to the church office. Shelby sits in her usual chair. The pastor's cell phone—she notices this immediately—lies on the table between them.

“I want to apologize for last week,” says Pastor Jess. “I hate to cancel at the last minute, but something suddenly came up.”

“What?” says Shelby.

“I'm sorry?”

“What came up?”

Pastor Jess seems flustered. “I had a—prior commitment. It completely slipped my mind.”

Shelby, whose appointment is at the same time every week,
doesn't see how that's possible. “It's all right,” she says graciously, though it isn't. “Anyways, you won't believe what happened. First, I went to the meeting. I almost chickened out at the last minute, but I went.”

“Meeting,” Pastor Jess repeats.

Is it possible that she doesn't remember?

“At the library. You know, about the gas drilling. I told them everything. The noise, and the water. Rich doesn't believe me, but it has a terrible smell.”

It isn't so easy to describe a smell. Shelby knows this from experience. Still, she tries.

“And they believed me! They think for sure our water is contaminated.”

“For sure? Don't you have to, I don't know, have it tested?”

“I was getting to that part.” It's disconcerting to be rushed. For the first time in years—since Braden's surgery—something momentous is happening to her. Shelby wants to savor the story, its twists and turns and surprising developments. Is that too much to ask?

“Dr. Trexler—he's the scientist—told me to call this lab in Pittsburgh. Which I did. But
they
said they couldn't drive all the way out here, so I called another lab, and—”

Again the pastor interrupts. “What does Rich have to say about that?”

Shelby isn't thrilled with this question.

“I haven't told him yet. I'm waiting until the results come back. Then he'll
have
to believe me.”

“Are you sure that's a good idea?” Pastor Jess leans forward in her chair. “Shelby, I'm happy to keep meeting with you, but I do think it would be more helpful if we got Rich involved.”

Which would be a reasonable suggestion, if Shelby were married to someone else.

“If child care is an issue, maybe someone could stay with them for a couple hours.”

“A babysitter?” Shelby feels her face heat. It's exactly what Rich is always saying:
They don't need you with them every minute of the day.
Every month or two, he bugs her about getting a job, not understanding that she already has one. That looking after a sick child is the hardest job on earth.

“A friend or relative,” says the pastor, as though it were just that easy. “Your mother lives in town, doesn't she? Can't she look after Braden and Olivia for an hour or two?”

Shelby gropes for an answer. Her mother is a subject she avoids at all costs. Also: she is fairly certain that Roxanne stole twenty dollars from her purse.

“She's pretty busy. Anyways, I'd be nervous leaving Olivia with anybody.”

“How is she feeling? Is the medication helping?”

“A little, I guess. But it doesn't solve the underlying problem. Remember how I thought it was food allergies? Dairy and corn? Now I know: she's sick from drinking our water! At the meeting—”

The pastor's cell phone buzzes, scuttling across the table like a bug.

“I'm so sorry,” she says, coloring. “Let me turn this thing off.” She reaches for the phone and turns off the ringer, though not without sneaking a peek at the screen. “So—the water. You're sure that's it? What does your doctor say?”

“Well, that's just it. Olivia needs to see a specialist. There's a doctor in Pittsburgh who knows all about this kind of thing, but I couldn't get an appointment until August twenty-eighth. I was thinking you could come with us. For moral support.”

“To Pittsburgh?” The pastor looks surprised. “Well, sure. You know, schedule permitting.”

“August twenty-eighth,” Shelby repeats. If she were Pastor Jess,
she would write down the date. “How come you never had kids?”

Pastor Jess looks startled by the question.

“We planned to, eventually. Somehow it was never the right time. There was so much else to do.”

“Like what?”

It occurs to Shelby—not for the first time—that Pastor Jess is selfish.

“Building the congregation, mainly. By the time we got around to trying, Wes wasn't feeling well. A few months later he was diagnosed.”

Trying, Shelby thinks. Her face is very hot.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” says the pastor. “I know you and Wes were close.”

Shelby looks around the room, which had once been his sickroom. After his death Pastor Jess had redecorated, removing every trace.

Shelby says, “Pastor Wes would have made a great father.”

There is a silence.

“You too,” she adds quickly. “A great mother.”

“Thank you.” Pastor Jess smiles briefly. “But that's enough about me. This is your time, Shelby.”

Yes, Shelby thinks. It is.

JESS WATCHES THE MINIVAN DRIVE AWAY.
In its back window is a diamond-shaped plastic sign:
BABY ON BOARD
.
A relic of Olivia's infancy—barely legible, now, the letters faded by the sun.

“Wes, what am I going to do with her?”

Their marriage is a conversation that hasn't ended, just grown one-sided. Jess talks to Wes the way other people talk to God, her own version of prayer.

In the kitchen she pours a glass of wine, exhausted by the work of listening. In two years of counseling, the content of Shelby's monologues has varied little: her fears and neuroses and frustrations,
her abiding and insistent needs. Shelby needs a friend, a mother, a babysitter for her children and possibly for herself. A divorce lawyer might come in handy, and a psychiatrist wouldn't hurt. Despite her best efforts, Jess is none of these things.

“What exactly does she want from me? What am I not doing?”

Wes, if he were here, would know the answers to these questions. Shelby had been a project of his, a stray to be rescued: Youth Group, an after-school job in the church office. In summer there was Vacation Bible School, Shelby's camp fees paid from the pastor's own pocket.

She has a mother,
Jess reminded him.

I've met the mother. Trust me,
said Wes.
We're all she's got.

She did trust him. If he'd been a different kind of man, she might have questioned his intentions, his active interest in a lost girl who loved him blindly. But he was Wesley, unimpeachable. The purity of his motives was beyond all doubt.

He had never lost patience. This earned him Shelby's lifelong gratitude, a fervent loyalty that is nearly religious. Shelby the faithful disciple, keeper of his memory. Once a month she places flowers on his grave and makes a point of telling Jess, which should not be annoying.

A project left unfinished, like so many others. Her husband's unfinished life.

Shelby never misses a counseling session, even when she has nothing to report. At such times, like a TV host in a slow news cycle, she fills out the hour with a human interest story—a stranger's tragedy, the more grotesque the better. The pregnant Florida woman in a coma, the Siamese twins joined at the heart. Shelby maintains a lively interest in the agony of strangers, their wrenching moral dilemmas. (If the twins are separated, one will die instantly. If not, both have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
Pastor Jess, what would you do?)

Possibly she's imagining it, the implied criticism: that she isn't
the pastor Wes was, that she was never the wife he deserved. Shelby studies her knowingly, as though she's guessed a secret: that Wes and Jess had argued about her; that their marriage wasn't perfect. That Jess—married too young to a boy who loved her too much—had sometimes wished for a different kind of love.

The intimacy of young marriage. Their first apartment was two cramped rooms above a picture-framing shop: ugly wallpaper, a loud refrigerator, clanging radiators that were always cold. The poor divinity student and his wife washed their clothes in the bathtub because the Laundromat cost a dollar. They showered together because they could. They ate meals side by side, from the same plate. She will never be that close to anybody again.

If the twins are separated, which one gets the heart?

Wesley had been the center of his mother's life, and from Jess, expected nothing less. Their marriage was exclusive in all ways. An hour on the phone with her sister was an hour stolen from him. He was, clearly, an only child.

They were exactly the same size—a tallish woman, a smallish man—and wore jeans and sweaters interchangeably. For most of their courtship, both were virgins. They waited two full years, as long as human beings could possibly wait. Later, because their Christian college demanded it, they kept up the charade of separate apartments but spent every night in Jess's twin bed, curled around each other like puppies. They fell in love in childhood, and in some way had remained children. In the shower they sang together. He had a beautiful voice.

An only child. Jess has known others, of course—only children of unexceptional temperament. But onliness, for Wes, was determinative. He was the onliest of children, the onliest child she had ever known.

A couple could sleep in a twin bed as long as neither moved.

At a certain point you had to move.

At a certain point you wanted your own plate.

Jess feels at times that Shelby is baiting her, daring her to lose patience, as if that would prove something.

She takes the cell phone from her pocket and listens to the message.
I'm finishing up some paperwork. I'll be there at nine.
Herc's voice is low and rumbling, an ordinary man's voice. He is nothing at all like her husband. For Jess, this is part of his appeal.

For her birthday he'd bought her lingerie, something Wes would have been embarrassed to do.

“I'M NOT ALLOWED,” OLIVIA SAYS.

Rich pauses in midscoop. He stopped at the Food Giant for a quart of chocolate chip, the kids' favorite. A
Batman
movie is in the DVD player. He employs this strategy every Thursday night while Shelby is at counseling: the same movie week after week, the same ice cream. He is grateful for his children's dependable enthusiasm, their appetite for sameness, their immunity to boredom.

“I got sick last time,” Olivia says.

“That was just a stomach bug. You're allowed. I say so.” Rich fills her bowl. “Just don't tell Mom.”

It is nearly dark, Braden and Olivia installed in front of the TV with bowls of ice cream, when he hears a crunch of gravel. He glances out the kitchen window. A truck idles in the driveway—a beat-up Ford 150, the same model he drives.

He steps out onto the deck and comes around to the front. At the wheel is his neighbor Rena Koval.

“Hey, Rich, how's it going?” she calls out the window, as though they're old friends. Neighbors for nine years, they have never, in his memory, actually spoken. They have a waving relationship. The one time he visited Friend-Lea Acres, with Carl Neugebauer, she was nowhere in sight.

She cuts the engine and steps out of the truck—a tiny thing, maybe five feet tall. He never realized she was so little. Does she sit on a phone book to see over the hood?

“Rena. What can I do for you?”

“Is Shelby around?” She is a pretty woman, curly haired, in faded jeans and shit-kicker boots. Older than Rich, probably, though she looks younger—the freckles maybe, or just the weird youthfulness of the very small.

He knows her from somewhere.

“Nah, she had an appointment.” He can't bring himself, somehow, to say the word
counseling.

“Oh, okay. I was wondering if she had any luck with the lab. The first one she tried—”

“The what?”

“The lab that does the water testing. She didn't tell you.” It isn't a question. It must be clear from his face that he has no clue what she's talking about. “At the meeting she was saying how—”

“What meeting? When?”

An awkward silence.

“We had a community meeting Tuesday night at the library,” says Rena. “About the drilling. She didn't tell you?”

“Oh, that,” Rich says, coloring. Shelby had told him she was going to Bible study.

Through the flimsy walls he hears the
Batman
soundtrack, gratingly familiar. He hates the music and yet finds himself humming it at odd moments. The
Batman
soundtrack will haunt his dreams.

“Anyways,” says Rena, “she was talking about your water, and—”

“What about my water?” He is aware of the edge in his voice.

“She said there was an odor. A chemical smell. Arvis Kipler has the same problem. I've done some research, and—”

“My water is fine,” he says through his teeth. “Shelby's just being neurotic. I wouldn't pay any attention.”

Another silence.

Rena asks, “How is Olivia feeling?”

The
Batman
soundtrack rises in pitch.