Lay It on My Heart (23 page)

As she pulls up, the Pinto coughs and dies. She restarts it, and a grinding sound echoes against the building.

“I don't know what we're going to do about dinner,” she says as soon as I get in. “I don't have a cent on me. We might be able to eat with your father in the dining room.”

“Okay.”

“Would that be agreeable to you or disagreeable? It's impolite to respond with ‘okay.' People can't tell what you're thinking.”

“Agreeable,” I say.

“That's better,” says Phoebe. “How was school?”

It is impossible to tell her about the pictures, about Kelly-Lynn, about the principal's office. There is too much I can't explain, even if I wanted to. “Fine,” I say.

“Curious about anything?” she asks, drawing out the words like I might be hard of hearing. I have no idea what I should be curious about, so I look at her hair, which seems the same, and her clothes, which seem to be what she was wearing when she left this morning.

“Um, why you were late?”

“I wasn't that late. It didn't kill you to wait for a few minutes. Anything else? No? What I'd like to know, I guess, is if it ever occurs to you to ask me how my day went.”

It doesn't. It has never occurred to me even that it would be a good or bad thing to ask. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” says Phoebe. “Thanks for asking.”

I wait to see if she is finished, and when she doesn't say anything more, I open my algebra book.

“I don't know how you can read in a moving vehicle,” she says. “It makes me positively sick to my stomach.”

I listen for something she might want me to answer, but there's nothing. I copy out the first algebra problem. I am not great at math, but I enjoy copying out each problem, the new, neat chance to get something right. I almost never see the problems through to their correct answers, though, and when I turn in math homework, whether I use pencil or pen, the paper is a mess.

Phoebe sighs loudly. I wedge my finger into the crack of my algebra book and wiggle it around until the space gets bigger, as if I could make myself small enough to crawl inside and disappear.

At the two-way stop, Phoebe asks me to check to the right for traffic while she looks to the left. “Am I good?” she says when her way is clear.

“No,” I say, watching a red pickup crawl toward the intersection.

“Plenty of time,” Phoebe says.

After the red truck, I track a boxy blue car a ways off but traveling fast.

“Am I good?” she says.

“I don't know,” I say. “I can't tell.”

Phoebe turns and glares at the blue car. “For heaven's sake. I could have gone. I know it's a lot to ask, Charmaine, but I need your help here.”

“How do you make turns when you're driving by yourself?”

“I can't wait until you're old enough to drive,” she says. “I can't wait for you to see how nerve-racking it can be.”

We leave Clay's Corner and head west over the stretch of highway that leads into Beacon County.

“They're still working on your father's medication,” Phoebe says after a time. “It's not the best situation. But it's good you've been writing to him. You have a very sweet side, Charmaine. Very thoughtful. One of these days I hope to see more of that thoughtfulness directed toward me.”

I stare out the window at the last few tobacco farms before we hit the horse country. You can look right through the front doorways of the big black barns to where the rough, yellowing sheaves hang like hides from the roof beams. In the fields, rows of harvested stalks go back so far and straight you can't see where they end. They're as regular as breathing, and as we pass, I count four rows as I breathe in and four rows as I breathe out, which reminds me to pray.

“If you have something to say, say it out loud,” Phoebe says.

“Are you mad at me?”

Phoebe frowns at the road. “Sometimes, yes, I admit it, but not right now. Believe it or not, Charmaine, the world does not revolve around you.”

At the big brick mansion, we enter the same waiting room as before, only with two different women behind the reception counter. One is a young brunette and the other is elderly, a redhead like Tracy but with white roots. She breaks into a smile and a “Hi-dee.”

Phoebe steers me toward the counter. “Marion, Lilly, this is Charmaine. We're seeing Doctor Phillips again. Both of us. I mean, all three of us.”

“Well, that's fine,” says the red-haired woman, the way older ladies say “that's fine,” with
fine
meaning “wonderful.”

The other woman, Lilly, leads us down the long hallway, up the staircase at the end of it, back down the upstairs hallway, and into the same white room as before. And although the doctor isn't there yet, my father is. He sits at a card table, facing the wall of windows like he's trying to make the most of the fading afternoon light. When he hears us, he looks over his left shoulder then turns back to his work as if he is used to ignoring interruptions. Then he straightens his shoulders like he's just realized who we are. He pushes back from the table, stands up, and turns around.

“Look who's here,” says Lilly, encouraging him.

“Go and say hi to your father,” Phoebe encourages me.

And I want to, or I feel like I should want to. But it's been three long weeks since I saw him sleeping in the hospital bed, and now he's standing there, very still, just the shape of him in front of the tall windows so that his face doesn't show, and he says nothing, and what I'm thinking is
He is here
,
he is here
, when of course I knew he would be here all along. And I feel all at once empty. I feel as though the way things used to be—even if it was a crazy way to live, as Phoebe says—has been drained right out of me, and I am filling up with how things are now. For the first time, I understand that things might be how they are now from now on, or that they might change again, and again even after that, until there's nothing left to recognize and no way back. This thought keeps me from breathing right. When I try to step forward, I can't. I seem to be moving my arm instead of my leg, reaching for something, but when I look, I see that I am not moving my arm at all.

“Let's all sit down and relax,” says Lilly, which helps me find my legs again. All of us, three from one end of the room and my father from the windows, make our way to a white couch and two chairs in a corner near the white piano.

“It's good to see you,” my father says to me. He's clean-shaven and puffy at the neck, and he does not sound nervous, and there is room—by which I mean
time
—for me to say something back to him, which is not normal. Usually my father and Phoebe talk hard at each other, over each other, filling in all the quiet spaces.

“It's good to see you,” I say back. In the corner of my eye I catch Phoebe running her tongue over her bottom lip.

My father turns to her. “Mother came by.”

“I know,” Phoebe says.

We all keep sitting there in the white room. It's starting to feel like something that happened a long time ago, something I'm remembering. Maybe something I dreamed. I can't think of one single thing to say, but as long as I don't look at my father, or at Phoebe, I feel peaceful. And suddenly sleepy. Like time is slowing way, way down. Like we're approaching the edge of a black hole.

“I guess it's been a while.” Lilly says. “But I made sure he got your letters, Charmaine.”

“Thanks,” I say, which comes out too loud.

“I think I hear the doctor,” says Lilly, and we all turn in relief to watch Lilly make her way to the door.

Dr. Phillips wears the same light brown corduroy coat as last time. His glasses have been pushed to the middle of his forehead, like he has another set of eyes up there over his brows. “This is an event, isn't it, David?” he says, taking the white chair next to my father. “Phoebe and Charmaine both here.”

“It is,” my father says. “An event,” he adds on. He talks like the sound of his own voice surprises him a little each time he hears it.

“I want you to be able to ask any questions you might have, Charmaine,” says Doctor Phillips. “This must all seem a little strange.”

Phoebe and my father are both studying my face like they're waiting for something to land on it. A giant insect, maybe, or a lunar module.

“First, maybe you and your mother will catch us up on the news of home. Then maybe your father will tell you a little about his days here.”

Phoebe has been holding her purse beside her, wedged in between her thigh and the chair. Now she leans over and places it on the floor. “Well, okay.” She crosses her legs in my father's direction. “I have subbing again every day this week. The Pinto is fixed. Temporarily. We had some very strong rains, and the river rose, and we lost the dock. Nothing flooded, though. Margaret Deeds told me she appreciated your old piece on prayer and expectation. Your mother seems fine. We're all looking forward to having you back.” She stops on the word
back
when my father and Doctor Phillips glance at each other.

“What?” Phoebe says.

“Let's keep going,” says the doctor.

My father picks up his feet one at a time and puts them back down. He's wearing a pair of suede moccasins, and I wonder if they're the same pair Phoebe said he was making for me.

“Has something been decided?” Phoebe says.

“Not at all,” says Doctor Phillips. “What else has been happening? You talked to David's mother, I believe you said? Daze?”

“I think I'm a little more interested in what's been happening here,” Phoebe says, looking full-on at my father. “Last week there was a bit of a complication.”

My father blinks at her slowly.

“Everything working better? The Haldol?”

“Lithium, now,” says the doctor.

“I have all that written down,” says Phoebe, uncrossing her legs. She straightens her posture with a little twist, and I steel myself for whatever's coming. “I just don't want there to be any communication loss here. What with all the other issues. Doctor?”

The doctor brings his glasses down from his forehead onto his nose and lays a hand over his mouth. One finger in the mustache, the rest curling toward his chin. “I understand you're concerned,” he says through his fingers.

“Oh, you do? I can't tell you what a relief that is.” Phoebe's voice is like a plucked wire. She shifts her whole body away from the doctor as if he's not there and beams the full wattage of her gaze on my father. “I said we were looking forward to having you back, and you looked at the doctor. Is there significance? Am I overreacting? I'm not sure I even know the difference anymore.”

“Perhaps conversation about aftercare options is premature,” says the doctor.

Phoebe nods quickly, and her voice changes to something almost pleasant, but I know better. “Because of Charmaine, here,” she says. She gestures toward me with kind, cupped hands, all without turning from my father. “We wouldn't want Charmaine to experience anything painful.”

“And because of David,” says the doctor. “And also because of you. It's a complicated time. Can we back up a little?”

“Oh, let's,” says Phoebe, and my stomach gets tight. I wish I could stop her, but I can't. It's like she has a fever. “Let's back up a month, to right before David came back from the Holy Land inhabited by the Apostle Paul. Or how about a year, when the Lord told David to quit his job and live on faith alone, and, guess what, his family too! Or how about when God laid it on his heart to eradicate the pagan holiday of Christmas, and we all passed out those brochures.” She reaches back to where I'm sitting and gives me an affectionate push on the knee. “What were you, Charmaine, nine? The year you wanted a Cabbage Patch doll? Remember we all went to Clay's Corner instead and handed out the brochures to shoppers about the ten reasons real Christians don't celebrate Christmas?”

I had forgotten about that Christmas, but now it comes back to me. Daze gave me the doll anyway, only she kept it for me at her place for a year so my father wouldn't know.

My father has leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, eyes closed. When he opens them they seem set deeper into his head, like he is trying to shrink into himself, away from Phoebe's voice. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it, then opens it again. “That's true,” he tells the doctor, as if holding on to facts he can confirm. “We did that.”

“Of course it's true,” says Phoebe, exploding. “Why would I make it up?”

“You're angry,” says the doctor.

“You're a genius,” says Phoebe.

“Are you coming home?” I say. My words come out like a little bleat, and my father turns his calm, unhappy eyes on me.

“Sweetheart,” he says, a word he hasn't used since I was very young. We all wait for him to say something else, but whatever he might have been about to say has left him. He reaches his hand over the space between us, palm up like he's feeling the weight of the air.

“Doctor,” says Phoebe, bending at the waist and reaching into her purse. She pulls out her pocket New Testament. “Are you familiar with Ephesians five:twenty-two?”

“Hold on a second,” says the doctor.

“Or Colossians three:eighteen?”

My father drops his head into his palms. I hate that he doesn't say anything. I wish that he had an idea he was trying to convince us of, or a new plan. Something so that I could tell him I got it, that I was willing, and he could tell me he knew the Lord was at work in me.

“David, are you okay?” says the doctor.

“Yes,” says my father, speaking straight down into the floor. “Let her go on.”

“Let me,” Phoebe says. “Let me?”

Outside the long windows it still seems like daytime, but when Lilly cracks the door open to flip on the light switch, the windows turn black against the bright white room. She dims the lights with a dial and closes the door again.