The Other Side of Darkness (2 page)

Jonathan is four years younger than I am, but unlike me, he is
not
an accident. Plus he is a much-wanted boy, named after my father, Jonathan Francis Reynolds. Once while playing hide-and-seek at church, I was hiding behind the drapes in the fellowship room when I overheard my mother talking to a lady friend. The other woman commented on how Lynette and I look nothing alike. “Oh, Ruth wasn’t planned, you know,” my mother said in a hushed tone, causing my ears to perk up and actually listen for a change. “Good grief. My little Lynette was still in diapers, and suddenly I was pregnant again! Can you imagine? Well, I was completely devastated by the—”

Just then Jonathan raced over and threw himself around my mother’s knees, complaining that he’d been left out of the childish game.

“Now, this one”—my mother spoke with pride as she ruffled his pale hair—“he was no mistake.”

Thirty years later

I
t’s all a mistake.” I wash my hands again, perhaps for the seventeenth time in the last hour. Never mind that they are already red and chapped or that the skin on my knuckles cracks when I make a fist. “I will call Pastor Glenn first thing in the morning and tell him it’s all just a stupid mistake.”

But even as I speak these words aloud for no one to hear but myself, I know that’s one phone call I will never make. Me stand up to a man in his position? Accuse him of error? Why, that would be like taking a stand against the Lord.

Or my mother.

I suck in a deep breath. Everything will be okay. Somehow I will make everything right again. I will pray for
three
hours tonight instead of two. That should help.

“Mommy?”

I turn to see my younger daughter standing in the hallway, her pale pink nightgown backlit by the hallway light so I can see her spindly legs trembling. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“That dream,” Sarah says in a shaky voice. “I had that dream again.”

I gather her into my arms, carry her over to the sofa, and pull a woolly afghan around both of us. “Dear Jesus, please drive away the
demons. Take them from us and throw them into your fiery pit. Send your angels to protect Sarah now. Take away those evil thoughts, and replace them with your good thoughts, O Lord …” I ramble on and on, just as I’ve been taught, until I finally hear Sarah’s even breathing and I am assured that she is asleep. I sigh. Once again I have kept the demons at bay.

This is all my fault
, I think as I tuck her back into bed. I glance over to make sure Mary is still asleep in the twin bed across from her little sister. Hopefully the demonic nightmares won’t attack her as well.

Satisfied that both my daughters are safe, I tiptoe down the hallway and pause by Matthew’s bedroom. I shake my head as I push open his partially shut door and see his floor strewn with castoff pieces of clothing—jeans in a heap right where he took them off, dirty socks in tight little wads next to his bed. How many times must I tell him to put his things away—that cleanliness truly is next to godliness? When will he get it? I consider going in there right now and doing it myself, but that would risk waking him. And right now Matthew is going through a difficult period.

Barely eighteen and just out of high school, he threatens on a regular basis to leave home. I can’t believe he’d really go through with it though. His job at the bookstore would never support him, and besides, wouldn’t he be scared out there—all on his own with so much evil lurking about? If he’s not careful, if he continues this careless living, the demons will come into his life and take over. And then what will I do?

I must pray harder than ever tonight. It seems the spiritual safety of my entire household is at stake. Maybe it has something to do with the full moon. Or the fact that it’s autumn, with Halloween
only a few weeks away. Pastor Glenn says the demons are more active now. Especially up here in Oregon, where nighttime and darkness come quickly this time of year.

I bite my lip as I glance at the clock. Rick will be home from work in less than two hours. At first I hated his so-called promotion because of the new nighttime hours at the shipping company, but sometimes, like now, I’m thankful for his absence. And I cringe to think what he will say when he gets home and hears what I’ve done.

Perhaps I should keep this from him since it will only upset him. There must be some way to make up for this mistake. If it really is a mistake. Maybe it was meant to be, just a blessing in disguise that will unfold later. Whatever it is, I think I can keep this secret between the Lord and me—and, of course, Pastor Glenn.

I slowly kneel in front of the worn plaid sofa, my elbows digging into the familiar grooves in the center of the middle cushion. I bow my head and prepare myself for spiritual battle. I know I will be drained before this is over.

“What are you doing?”

I startle, surprised to find that I’m still on my knees, slumped over the sofa like a rag doll. I attempt to stand, but my legs are numb from lack of circulation, and the best I can do is to roll over in an ungraceful flop as I look up at my husband and try to read his expression. His brow is creased, but is it with anger or concern?

“I was praying. I must’ve fallen asleep.”

“Why don’t you pray in bed?” Rick sets his Thermos lunchbox on the coffee table in front of me with a tired sigh. “Then at least you could fall asleep there.”

I just stare blankly at the blue and white insulated lunchbox. All I can think is,
That doesn’t belong there
.

“Ruth!”

I look back up at him, then blink. “Huh?”

“I was talking to you.”

“I guess I’m just sleepy.”

“Or spacey.” He reaches out to help me stand.

“Yeah …” I slowly get to my feet. “Sorry.”

“I was just asking you if you made that deposit today.”

“Sure, of course …”

“I tried to use my debit card at noon, and the ATM said we had insufficient funds.”

“Oh, I didn’t make it to the bank until after three. I ended up helping out at school again and—”

“Seems like you end up helping out there every other day.” He runs his fingers through his scraggly brown hair, his sign of frustration and a reminder that he needs a haircut again.

“They were short-handed, and there’s a lot to do for the Harvest Celebration.”

“Well, then maybe they should just hire you. Better yet, just give us a discount or even a refund on the girls’ tuition. You told me one of the benefits of getting them into a Christian school, well, aside from their
spiritual welfare
,”—he shakes his head—“was that it’d make it easier for you to focus on
other
things, things like managing the house and the bills, grocery shopping. You even said you might get a part-time job, Ruth. What happened to all those high aspirations?”

“I don’t know …”

“And now you can’t even make it to the bank on time?”

“Sorry.”

“I told Leon that I’d pay him back that fifty today, and I ended up looking like a real jerk.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, whatever. Just give me some cash, and we’ll call it good.”

“I, uh, I didn’t get any cash back.”

“Why not?”

“I … I forgot.”

He shakes his head dismally. “But you did remember to deposit the check, right?”

I nod.

“Okay, where’s the checkbook?” He walks over to where my purse is hanging on its usual hook on the oak hall tree by the front door and begins to dig through it. “I’ll just write Leon a check.”

I can’t hide this anymore. Once Rick sees the checkbook, he’ll know what I did. It’ll all be out in the open.
God, help me
.

He extracts the checkbook and trudges toward the kitchen. I pick up his lunchbox and follow, preparing myself for this next scene.

“What the—” Rick turns, holding the opened checkbook to the spot where I wrote Pastor Glenn that check today.

“Three hundred dollars?”
He glares at me. “For Valley Bridge Fellowship? What’s this for? We already paid up their tuition. We bought the girls their fancy-dancy uniforms and school supplies and God only knows what else. Another three hundred dollars? What in God’s name for?”

I cringe at his careless use of our Lord’s name. Rick knows better than to take it in vain. And he knows how painful it is for me to hear him talk like that.

“It was a misunderstanding. A mistake. I plan to take care of it—”

“A
mistake
?” He steps closer, holding the checkbook right
under my nose. “It looks like
your
handwriting, Ruth. How is this a mistake?”

I explain how Pastor Glenn told me he was collecting donations to get groceries and pay the electric bill for a family in need and how when I said I wanted to help, he somehow misunderstood me. “He thought I said that I wanted to cover the entire expense myself, but I didn’t understand. And when it turned out that he needed three hundred dollars and he was so blessed by our generosity, well, I just didn’t know how to explain that wasn’t what I meant and that I’d only planned to give him twenty dollars … and the next thing I knew, I was writing out a check for the full three hundred.”

“That’s insane, Ruth.”

I don’t respond.

“You gave away
our
grocery and
our
bill-paying money to help a family in need, for Pete’s sake. Now
we’re
a family in need!”

“Don’t talk like that, Rick!”

It’s too late. Now he’s swearing and slamming his lunchbox into the sink, and I slip away, going into the girls’ room, where I lie on the floor between their two beds.

Dear Lord, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry
. I say this sentence over and over. Like a scratched vinyl record, I am stuck on these four words. But I believe that they are the right words and that repeated enough times they will make things better. All I want is for things to get better. I am so sorry.

I
wake up in the darkness, my back aching from the hard floor beneath the plush pink carpeting in my daughters’ bedroom. According to the alarm clock on the maple dresser between their beds, it’s only 4:56. Too early to wake them, and yet I don’t want to return to my own bedroom. Even if Rick is asleep, which is likely, I’m not ready to be near him yet.

I stay where I am and use this time to pray for my girls—to pray that their day will be especially blessed and that their classes will go well and, perhaps most important, that they will finally start to feel like they fit in at their new school.

It’s only their fourth week, but I expected they’d have made the adjustment by now. The fact that they’re still struggling fills me with guilt and doubt. Was it a mistake to make this move? Mary would’ve started middle school this year, and I’d heard such bad things about the flawed and ungodly curriculum taught in public schools, the horrendous peer pressure, and even an increase in drug use among preteens. Really frightening.

Thankfully, Pastor Glenn does an excellent job of keeping his congregation informed. He often preaches on the serious problems facing public education these days and how our society will pay a high price for the low morals and values being taught to the younger generation. Of course, Rick says he only espouses these “opinions”
in order to promote the church’s Christian school because the school is steadily losing popularity as well as money. But I’m sure Rick is simply biased. More and more it seems that Rick is falling away from the church, falling away from the Lord. And I feel certain that Pastor Glenn, as our spiritual shepherd, only wants the best for his sheep.

But changing over to a private school hasn’t been easy on the girls, and only yesterday Sarah complained about missing her old friends at Hampton Elementary. Then Mary chimed in by saying how the kids at Valley Bridge Fellowship still treat her like an outsider. “We’ll never fit in there,” she lamented as I drove them home. And I could see that Mary was holding back tears. Poor thing. I know it’s not easy being twelve.

And it’s not as if I can’t relate to their misery. I always felt like a misfit as a child. Although I’m sure Mary will never go through the sort of pain I experienced. At least she gets to dress like her peers. No one can tease her about her clothes. It wasn’t like that for me. For starters, even though all the other girls in my class had been wearing blue jeans to school since fourth grade, when the dress code changed, my mother would not allow us to wear jeans for anything besides chores and play.

“I want my daughters to look respectable,” she had told us again and again, completely unaware that Lynette had been sneaking jeans to school since her first year in junior high, quickly changing in the bathroom before class started.

But I was never that brave. I settled for the mandatory skirts and sweaters, and if I wore pants, they were always “trousers,” as Mom called them. Corduroy or twill and always neatly pressed. But besides dressing like a nerd, I always seemed to be worried about something
or other, and I know this must’ve kept any potential friends at bay. But I just couldn’t seem to help myself.

“Why do you put your shoes in a circle like that?” Marilyn Van Horn had asked me one afternoon when she surprised me by agreeing to come home with me after school. At first I’d been extremely nervous about her visit, imagining all the things my mom could do to embarrass me. But luckily for me, Mom had taken Jonathan to Cub Scouts that afternoon, and Lynette was off at ballet, so I had the house to myself.

“Oh, I just do that for fun,” I told Marilyn, not willing to admit that I felt better when the toes of my shoes were all touching, connected.

“Your room is
so
neat and clean.” She eyed my comb and brush and hair barrettes, all lined up meticulously along my spotless dresser top. “Do you guys have a maid or something?”

I laughed. “No. My mom just likes us to keep things picked up.” And that wasn’t a lie. It’s just that I took cleanliness to a whole new level. This was partially to keep Mom off my back but also for my own sense of security. I believed life was under control when my room was in perfect order.

Marilyn continued walking around my room, examining everything. She reminded me of my aunt’s terrier, Fritz, as she sniffed about searching, I felt certain, for oddities or perhaps even a dead rodent somewhere. And after just a few minutes, her presence started to make me very uncomfortable, and each time she touched any of my things, I wondered why I had allowed this girl into my world. I even hinted to her that maybe she should leave.