Showers in Season (5 page)

The numbness spread through Tory like an anesthetic going in through a vein, slowly branching out over her heart, reaching her heavy, pressured lungs, oozing into her arms and her hands and her fingers. The tears on her face dried as she walked out to their car, and she would not allow new ones to fall.

Tennessee wind whipped up from the Smokies, blowing her brown hair back from her face, but her eyes could not absorb the sight of the majestic autumn hills in the distance. She couldn’t fathom the thought that there was more than pavement and metal farther down the road.

By habit, Barry opened her car door, and Tory slipped inside, quiet as he came around to the driver’s side and got in beside her. They both sat for a moment, staring vacantly out at those hills, but seeing only the windshield that seemed to block their view.

“There has to be some mistake,” Barry said, shattering the silence.

Tory looked over at him. “You think? Could they have gotten our lab tests mixed up with someone else’s? Misread it or—”

“They must have.”

“But he said it was conclusive.”

He seemed stumped by that, and kept staring at the windshield. “Still, it has to be a mistake,” he said. “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. But we—you and I—we’re not cut out to have a child like this. You were going to write, and Brittany’s just now in school.”

“An hour ago I was going to put that on hold for the baby, and neither of us minded.”

He swallowed hard. “But it’s not like a normal, healthy baby,” he said through his teeth. “We’re not talking about putting things on hold for a while.” His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “We’re talking about giving them up entirely. We’re talking disruptions to our family, neglect of our other children, a lifelong commitment to raise a child who will never grow up.”

The numbness fled. And as the feeling began to seep back into her, tingling in her toes and her fingers, throbbing harder behind her eyes, she fought the tears threatening to drown her. She knew that Barry wasn’t speaking out of ignorance. He was thinking of Nathan, the autistic skeleton in Barry’s closet, who sat like a fixture in his mother’s home, staring into space and ignoring holidays and birthdays, the births of nephews and nieces, the accomplishments of people who loved him.

Tory had been uncomfortable around Barry’s brother since the first day he brought her home to meet his parents. She had always wondered whether to speak to him or pretend he wasn’t there. Was there some part of his brain that heard and understood, even though his face never betrayed it? Did he quietly harbor annoyance and irritation at the people who talked to him like a baby, in a loud voice, as if he was hard of hearing? Or perhaps, he was. No one really knew for sure. He spent his days staring at some dimension no one else could see, moaning at discomfort, but sighing aloud at the modest pleasures, like the sun
hitting his face as he sat in the prayer garden in his mother’s backyard. And then there was the whistling that never ceased, except when he was asleep. Every day for years he had whistled songs over and over, whatever tune he heard last, whether it was on the radio or the television, or from his mother’s fingers as she played the piano in the living room.

Tory stared at a spot on the windshield, and wondered if it was a chip hewn by a rock, or if it was a smashed bug or some debris that could be scraped off with her fingernail. Then she wondered why such a mundane thought would cross her mind at the worst hour of her life.

“At least we haven’t told the kids,” he said.

Again, the pain sliced through her heart. “I was so looking forward to telling them today.”

He glanced over at her. “What did you think? That the doctor would tell us everything was fine? That there was nothing to worry about? You were the one who wanted to keep it secret.”

“I don’t know why. Part of me thought something could be wrong. The other part thought it would all be just fine. Pretty stupid, huh?”

He shrugged. “Never in a million years did I think…”

His voice cracked, and he let the thought hang. He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, and they were silent as they drove home. Her mind raced through the conversation with the doctor, replaying every word, every line, reading hope and denial into every nuance of what he had said.

As they reached their own neighborhood and pulled into Cedar Circle, Tory prayed that neither Brenda nor Cathy, nor the Gonzales family who was living in Sylvia’s house while she was gone, would see them coming. She couldn’t talk to them now.

Suddenly, the injustice of it all overwhelmed her. Everyone else had healthy children. Everyone else could expect normalcy. In their pregnancies, they could expect nine months of joy and anticipation. They could go into labor and know that it would end well, hear that baby’s cry, clutch it in their arms. They could have showers and celebrate and take the baby to grocery stores
and not be plagued with the fear of someone staring or pointing, or simply not knowing what to say.

Barry pulled his car into the driveway, and Tory got out. She stood there, staring at the door, and suddenly realized that she couldn’t go in and face the babysitter, or the children. Not yet.

“I need to be alone for a minute,” she told him. “I’m just gonna go for a walk.”

He didn’t stop her. She knew that he, too, wanted some solitude to sort through his thoughts. But someone had to tend to the children, and she had asked first. As he went in, she launched out to the backyard, and crossed behind Sylvia’s house. She hoped the Gonzaleses didn’t come out and speak to her now. She didn’t have the patience to listen through their accents and explain the customs that made so little sense to them. They were still so curious about the upcoming Halloween that they had a million questions even she couldn’t answer.

She pulled her sweater more tightly around her and passed behind the empty stables where the horses used to be. Her anger increased with every step as she trod down the path through the woods that came out to a pasture on the other side. The wind was crisp as it whipped through the trees and blew up her hair around her face, cutting through her clothes and making her shiver. She walked faster as she went, each step making the anger coil up inside her like the red-hot heat in a radiator. Tears stung her eyes and burned down her face, and she wiped them away with cold hands as she kept walking.

She came out on the other side of the mountain, where she could see more of the hills that loomed behind their homes. A few thick clouds loomed over their peaks, and she looked up even farther above them, her eyes searching the sky for the God who watched over it all.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered between her teeth, but the words seemed to get lost on the wind. She lifted her chin, still searching the sky. “It’s not fair!” she bit out, her voice undulating on the emotion that gave it wings. The wind whipped up harder, colder, against her face. She closed her hands into fists.
“
Why!
” she screamed louder this time, the word echoing out over the valley.

She fell to her knees in the grass and covered her face with both hands, weeping out her anguish as the wind rustled through her clothes and dried the tears as fast as they came. She was beginning to feel nauseous, just as she had this morning when she had awakened, and her head still throbbed with the pressure of her emotion. She wept and wailed, knowing that no one was nearby who could hear. No one would hear unless they lived downwind in the valley, and then they would only look up and know that someone was suffering somewhere. Maybe they would say a prayer for her.

She heard a cat squall a few feet behind her, and she turned around to see her pet scrabbling down a tree trunk with a baby bird in its mouth. She heard fluttering above her and looked up to see a small nest with baby chicks rustling around their mother, chattering and chirping about the feline that had almost done them all in.

She clapped her hands to startle the cat. “No, Babs! No!” But the cat wasn’t intimidated.

The mother bird left the nest and flew down to the ground, a few feet away from the cat. Helpless, she watched as the cat dropped the chick into the grass. Tory got up and went to grab the cat, but he only darted away playfully, as if daring Tory to chase him. Tory turned back to the baby bird and saw that it wasn’t moving.

All of her pain, all of her anguish, all of the wrenching anger that had gripped her heart and driven her to her knees, seemed suddenly to focus on that little wounded bird. The mother flew up to a low branch on the tree, but kept her eyes on the chick.

She picked up the little bird, cradling it in her hands, and realized it was dead. There was nothing she could do.

Tory wondered if mother birds grieved.

That inexpressible sadness sucked her under again, and she laid the chick back down and turned away from the mother. They had no control, either of them. Their children were vulnerable to terrible things, and there was absolutely nothing they
could do. Of all the jobs in the world, she thought, motherhood had to be the most frightening.

Despairing that inside her a wounded baby grew, she wailed. She put her hands over her stomach. She was just as pregnant now as she had been this morning before she’d known what kind of child she was carrying, just as pregnant as she’d been two and a half weeks ago when she’d read that pregnancy test. This baby was as real as Brittany or Spencer had ever been, and just as much hers. It was as real as that dead baby bird on the ground.

But God knew about the baby bird, she realized suddenly. He knew about the mother bird, still watching hopefully, helplessly, from her perch. He knew about the baby Tory was carrying.

She sat back on the grass and looked up at those clouds again. She felt a raindrop hit her cheek, her nose, her eyelid. In seconds, it was raining on her and around her, a soft warning of the storm to come. But she had the sense that she wasn’t alone.

“My baby,” she whispered, weeping for the child and all the heartache that might come to her in her life, for all the things she would never have and all the things she would miss. For all the things she would never understand.

There was so much uncertainty, she thought. So much she wouldn’t know until the baby came and they saw how severe the retardation was. Until then, there was only one thing that was certain. This baby would be a part of her family, the little sister of Brittany and Spencer, the third and youngest child with the Sullivan name. Somehow, God would give Tory the grace to endure. This was her child. It was God’s child, too.

She breathed in a deep, cleansing breath and got back to her feet, dusted her pants off, and let the rain drizzle through her hair and wash her face. But it didn’t wash the grief away. It still weighed her down, bending her and threatening to break her.

Slowly, Tory started back up the path toward Cedar Circle, knowing her “why” would not be answered now. Sometimes there was no clarity, no sense to be made. Sometimes one just had to trudge through, trusting that there would be joy again on the other side.

When the clouds passed, the rain would stop. Life would be cleansed and fed and sustained. Mothers would patch their hearts back together and move on, doing what had to be done. She would endure these rains somehow.

The rains were pouring harder in León, Nicaragua, as a huge hurricane swirled up from the Pacific. Sylvia had seen Internet reports that it had already reached deadly force. Unless it turned in another direction, it was headed straight for their coast.

She stood just outside her open front door under the eaves of their house, watching the rain pound down and listening to the thunder. Because of the hard rain, business at the clinic had slacked off for the day, and Harry had been trying to update the files he kept on his patients. Sylvia had wanted to go out and visit some of his sicker patients, but there were areas of the city that were already flooding, and she feared that her car would get stalled and she wouldn’t be able to get back. That sense of having no purpose assaulted her again, and she longed for the days when she had two children at home, and didn’t have one moment to herself. Those moments had fled so quickly. And she longed for her friends in Cedar Circle. She remembered sitting
on Brenda’s porch on rainy nights, laughing and talking as Tory grew and Cathy learned and Brenda taught. Sylvia had been the mother figure of the bunch, whether she’d wanted to play that role or not. But she had been older than the others, and already had her child-rearing work behind her. That made her an expert.

Funny, she didn’t feel like an expert in anything now.

She heard Harry’s footsteps on the parquet floor behind her and looked over her shoulder. He began to hum a tune, one she couldn’t identify, and he took her hand and swung her around with a flourish. “Rain always makes me want to dance,” he said.

She laughed as he began to move across the floor with her, then dipped her, and pretended he was going to drop her. “Harry!” she cried. He pulled her up again, then crushed her against him and spun around. Harry always knew how to make her laugh. She pressed her face against his neck and listened to his deep humming. She loved his voice. It was so strong and gentle, so full of compassion and joy.

He spun her and dipped her again. Holding her frozen in that dip, he asked, “So tell me why a good-looking woman would be staring out into the rain with a sad look on her face.”

The sad look was gone, and she grinned up at him. “You’re going to drop me, aren’t you?”

“Not until you tell me what was on your mind.”

“
Then
you’re going to drop me?”

He laughed and pulled her up again with an exaggerated flourish, then let her go. She slid her arms around his waist and kissed his chin. He pushed the hair back from her cheek and gave her the understanding look that had helped her through so many trials. “Come on. What’s wrong?”

“Just homesick,” she said. “Remembering.”

He slid his arms around her and held her tight. “We have great memories, don’t we? And many more to come.”

“Yeah. But I’m having trouble not knowing what those future memories are going to look like. What’s God going to do with me here?”

“He’s going to use you to advance his kingdom. The same thing he’s done with you for most of your life.”

“I know, but this…this is so concentrated. I feel like I have to do something quickly, or it’s not worth our coming. Days like today, with all the rain, I feel kind of helpless.”

“Well, if that hurricane hits, we’re all going to feel helpless. There’ll be lots of work to do. Let’s take advantage of this calm before the storm. God doesn’t want us to use it feeding depression.”

She smiled up at him. “Then what does he want us to do with it?”

He grinned in that amazing way he had that reminded her why she had married him. “He wants us to dance,” he said.

And as he began to hum again, they danced to the sound of rain just outside their door, and thunder cracking around them.