Matters of Faith (26 page)

As if sensing my thoughts, Cal got
Beetlejuice
set up in the machine and then sat down and spoke softly. “Good trip today. These guys knew what they were doing already, didn't need much from me but a boat, so I got to fish, got to think.”

He stopped and looked down in his lap, rubbing his hands together as if applying lotion. I could hear his rough skin rasping, remembered its feel on my own smooth skin and wondered if I would ever feel it again.

“You know, I kind of thought: Does it matter?”

“Does it matter?” I repeated. “I don't know what you mean.” I did not want to assume anything, because what I was already assuming was not only not flattering, but was raising my all-too-familiar flags of anger at Cal.
Does it matter?

“Don't get me wrong, yeah, it matters a lot that she's here, that this happened at all. But, even if I'm sort of having a hard time with . . . whatever, hope, I suppose, should what I'm willing to do be any different than if I wasn't?”

I had to take apart what he was saying. Cal could be willfully obscure at times, but the times that he spoke of the important things in our lives, he was obscure without malice, his words caught in his feelings like a bird in fishing line, and I had to slowly, carefully unravel things if I wanted to get to his meaning and intent.

I had often felt like a detective in our marriage. And that was not a complaint. I enjoyed the slowing down of our altercations, the time it forced me to take to understand each word, the time it gave me to formulate my own responses. In our home, fights were quick and then quickly over, whether they were resolved or not.

But the discussions, the real ones, they were often slow enough to last until the early morning hours. And in most cases, by the end of them we, or at least I, felt as though we had reached some new level of understanding of ourselves and each other and how a marriage, our marriage anyway, worked. We hadn't had one of those discussions in a very long time, and I did not know why, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been at least fifty percent my fault.

It was another example of the loss of “try” in our relationship. And I realized, as I untangled, and sorted, and considered, that he was acknowledging that too, only with Meghan. Perhaps he did not believe, but he was willing, perhaps even needed, to act as though he did.

I nodded. “Okay. Good. I started really working on her to open her eyes today,” I said. “Maybe between us we can get something.”

He nodded, and we had sealed something new. Our differences over Marshall were still on the table, as was our marriage, but on Meghan, we seemed to finally agree in some basic way.

“So tell me about the trip,” I said, leaning back and closing my eyes. I hadn't asked for a fishing story in a long time. I used to ask him to tell me about his day every night when we climbed in bed, falling asleep to his deep voice vibrating through my pillow the way my father's bedtime stories of Euclid and Aristotle used to.

And I did fall asleep in my recliner, the lights on bright overhead, with images of Cal, shirtless, fishing rod in hand. He was doing the thing that he was meant to do in this life, coming to epiphanies, decisions, resolutions, surrounded by the things he loved most, birds and fish and gators, mangroves and cypress and water.

He didn't spend that night on the boat, but stayed with me after I woke, and we watched Winona Ryder movies with our daughter, hoping for a movie ending, and holding hands across her still body, ignoring everything outside her room.

Dinner had been quiet, all of them exhausted with sun and fishing, and Marshall was embarrassed when he fell asleep on the sofa and woke to hear Ada and Grandmother Tobias talking softly at the dining room table. He wasn't sure he wanted them talking so much.

He felt his pocket, grasping the edges of his cell phone. It felt like a time bomb. He knew that when he turned it on this time the calls from his mother, and perhaps some from his lawyer—or his former lawyer—would no longer be mildly concerned. They would be angry and demanding, and what would he do then?

His grandmother patted the Bible that lay on the table in front of her, and Ada glanced over at Marshall. He smiled faintly at her. She didn't return the smile. In fact, the ends of her mouth turned down, and she murmured something to Grandmother Tobias.

“I guess it's time for all of us to turn in,” his grandmother said, turning toward him. “Time to wash up, Marshall.”

He still felt groggy, and her tone suddenly irritated him. He wasn't a child, and she certainly hadn't known him long enough to speak to him as if he were. He'd had Ada all to himself at school. At home, he'd had to share her with Meghan, here he was sharing her with his grandmother. They should never have gone home for spring break. If they had stayed at school, none of this would have happened.

And now they were probably never going back to school, never going back home.

He got to his feet and walked over to Ada, placing his hand on her shoulder. “I'm not quite ready for bed,” he said, trying to keep his tone light and confident. “I thought Ada and I would go for a walk.”

His grandmother's face darkened, and Ada looked between them quickly. “I don't think I'm really up for a walk,” she said, looking down at her knees. He immediately felt like an idiot.

“No, of course not,” he said, trying to salvage his pride. “I just meant out to the backyard, to see the stars. Come on, I'll help you.”

“No, really, it'll be buggy, and I'm tired,” she protested. “We should just get to bed.”

She rose and gave him a pointed look he chose to ignore. “Well, I'm going to go, but you go ahead,” he said, returning her look as best he could. It didn't affect her at all, and when his grandmother pushed back from the table and Ada walked down the hall to the guest room, he felt an irrational anger well up in him.

Grandmother Tobias said, “Maybe we'll get some more fishing in tomorrow.”

He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, watching Ada's retreat, desperate to pull her back to him somehow. It already felt too late. She had attached her loyalty to his grandmother, accepting without question her assertion that they were to proceed apart.

Because God had told her so.

Told her. Talked to her. Put a voice in her head and formed words and proclaimed.

She turned away from him and he watched her walk down the same hall Ada had just disappeared down. He stood in the living room in the dark until he saw the light under Ada's door wink out, and then he opened the back door and wandered out to the middle of the yard, the grass still warm under his feet.

He stretched out in the same spot Ada had been in that afternoon and watched the night sky, ignoring the pinpricks of the mosquitoes and the rustle of the night creatures in the oppressive woods beside the house, but listening for the telltale barking of the pack of dogs.

His cell phone rebuked him from his pocket. It felt like a living thing now, a constant reminder of his failures. He didn't know why he kept it, and since he hadn't bothered charging it in days, it would be dead soon enough anyway.

He stared at the stars, at the banks of dark clouds that were rolling over them from the west, illuminated from within when lightning sparked in them, bringing a promise of thunderstorms and rain, and asked God to speak to him as He had spoken to Grandmother Tobias. It stood to reason that if God spoke to both his grandmother and grandfather, then perhaps He would speak to him.

Though if faith was passed down through the genes like eye color, why didn't his father believe in anything but the gods of fish and water? His mother he could understand: Being the daughter of academics, her genes had contained loads of curiosity, yet little concrete faith, not just theologically, but in anything, including her own opinions.

When he'd asked his parents about their beliefs—and he had asked, nearly relentlessly—he'd been met with silence from his father and an open lecture series from his mother. Neither had answered his questions. Neither had told him, in any sort of specific way, what
their
beliefs were.

The clouds moved across the sliver of the moon and he felt a raindrop on his left cheek. When Meghan was little, she used to crawl into bed beside him when there was a thunderstorm at night. She would shiver for a few moments, and then fall deeply asleep, as though simply being with him was enough to keep her safe. She drove him crazy on those nights. She thrashed and rolled and kicked, all while asleep. He'd finally told her that she could no longer come in if she couldn't stay still.

The next time she came in, she lay gingerly at his side on her back, her arms straight at her sides, legs stretched out, taking up as little room as she could. She finally fell asleep, and to his amazement she managed to maintain this perfect form throughout most of the night.

Ironically, her very stillness left him sleepless, and he kept checking to make sure she was breathing. When she'd made her presence known, felt in every kick and roll, he'd wanted nothing more than to get rid of her. But the fact that she was strong enough to change her sleeping habits, was strong enough to maintain it while not even awake, simply to stay with him, fascinated him.

She'd stopped being afraid of thunder by the time she was ten, just in time for him to go to college. Now he wondered if she had weaned herself off of his protection in anticipation of his departure. It seemed reasonable that someone who could change their behavior even in sleep could do that.

He heard the back door open and close softly, and when Ada lowered herself to the grass beside him, he rolled over toward her, burying his face in her neck, breathing her in. She stroked his hair, but when he ran his hand down her thigh, she stopped him. He tried again and again and she stopped him.

Within moments, they were grappling with each other on the lawn, and he finally, to his horror, burst into tears when it was clear that she was not simply playing hard to get, wasn't mock wrestling with him, but was determined to keep him from the solace of her body.

“What?” he demanded, savagely wiping the damning tears away.

She sat up, breathing heavily, and brushing the sides of her legs free of grass. “Marshall, we have to move beyond that.”

“But we've already—”

“I know,” she silenced him. “And that was wrong.”

“No, it wasn't,” he protested. “It was beautiful. Ada, I love you.”

“No,” she said harshly. “You used me.”

He gasped. Perhaps he could have expected her to rethink their sexual relationship, but he hadn't expected her to blame him completely for it, or to think so unkindly of him.

“I did not,” he said.

“You did,” she insisted. “But I don't blame you. I let it happen. I wasn't strong enough. I got distracted. If we're going to do this, if we're ever going to work, then we have to start over. We have to atone, be made clean. Especially if we're going back to my family. I can't go back there . . . like that.”

“I thought we weren't traveling
on the same road
,” he said bitterly.

She gave him a long, considering look that felt heavy on his cheek, as if she'd placed a hand there to try to read his thoughts.

“We have to leave,” she said softly and watched him. “We shouldn't have come here. We have to leave soon. The sooner the better. Your grandmother's asleep. We could leave tonight.”

He looked away from her. “Ada? How come you never told me that you were born in Canada?”

“It didn't seem important. How come you never told me about your grandparents?”

“How did you get into my room?”

“What do you mean?” Ada asked, slanting a cagey glance at him.

“That night at the house, when you came into my room. I had locked the door. How did you get in?”

“It's not like it was a deadbolt or anything, Marshall,” she said. “Those little locks are pretty easy to get open.”

They were silent. Something being pursued, or perhaps the pursuer, in the wildness of the thick brush screamed, and Marshall felt a chill rise along his backbone, spread beneath his thighs.

“I—can't go with you. I have to go back,” he said, his voice quivering with the anguished truth of it. The fresh silence in the backyard made him feel more alone than ever before.

“I know,” she finally said. “But I can't.”

This time it was his turn. He looked in her eyes. “I know.”

“I'm sorry,” she said softly. “I'm so sorry.”

He did the only thing he could for her. He gave her the keys to the car and as much cash as he could. They moved quietly about the house, getting her ready, and he held her tightly before she got in the car. “I love you,” he whispered fiercely in her ear.

“I know,” she whispered back. “Take care of yourself, Marshall. Have faith.”

He couldn't even watch her drive away. As soon as she started the engine, the dogs came out of the brush, yipping and howling as they converged on the car. He backed into the house, gently shutting out the sounds of their hunger and desperation as the car faded away.

OUR détente didn't last long. Cal strode into Meghan's room later that week and came right to my chair, holding his cell phone up as if it would explain things.

“Why didn't you tell me about Ada?”

I was going to tell him. But then he had come in full of hope for Meghan, and all I wanted was to keep things peaceful between us for as long as I could.

“I was going to tell you,” I said.

He paced the hospital room, anger radiating from his set shoulders, his tight mouth. I stayed silent. There was nothing I could say right now that would be heard the way I meant it. But then this was the direction things seemed to be moving in, the inexorable slide—started at some point in the past that I'd never been able to pinpoint—into the pool of separateness.