The two missionaries knocked on my door the same afternoon an entire mountain collapsed somewhere in Oregon. “Sinkhole,” the news had reported. It was also a sinkhole that had swallowed half of Mexico City in August, a trailer park in Indiana in July, and the country of Liechtenstein in June. The world’s ever-shortening attention spans, and the fact that re-construction companies propped up the economy allowed these things to wrinkle in and smooth out without much panic; though, those who had once traveled to Liechtenstein continued to mourn the loss of the lovely red and blue crown stamp the country used to put in your passport.
But they came—the missionaries—and it wasn’t the mild tumult of yet another disaster that made me let them in, seat them on our Pottery Barn couch, and offer them cups of faucet water. It was their name tags. White letters engraved on black rectangles: ELDER BENGTZEN and ELDER VANHORN. Granted, I had spent the whole of that day off work playing Skyrim with strangers online, but that word Elder made me feel they had something of wisdom to offer. Like, if I talked to them, they’d give me what I needed to make it to the next level. Seattle, where I lived, seemed a little low on usable wisdom at that point in time.
I also liked their smiles—their big, toothy, truthful smiles; their haircuts, clean and sharp; their iron-creased white shirts, their simple ties. They looked spit-shined. You didn’t often see kids their ages dressed like this unless they were going to prom or carted by their mothers into juvenile court.
Really, I let them in because I thought about Jacob. How he would have been just a few years short of their age by now. I wanted to believe he would be this kind of kid, the kind of kid that made other men wish their kids were like him—content and engaged—not one of those teenagers lost in their iDevices, oblivious, a look on their face of being bored with everything immediately.
Katja was away at an architect’s convention in Chicago for a few days so I didn’t think it would do any harm, letting them in.
“We’d like to share with you a short message about Jesus Christ,” Elder Bengtzen, the toothier of the two, said. “And about how families can be together forever.”
I’m not sure what happened, exactly what got inside me or how, but I listened. I felt something I couldn’t see. I believed it. It felt like I’d been thrown a piece of reliable wood to hold to in this deep sea of nothing, the way the world had started to feel. I needed something more than just what I could provide to myself.
—
“Would you mind if I joined a church?” I asked Katja, four nights later. I’d just brought her home from the airport, a bunch of tulips purchased to welcome her back; now both of us in the bedroom, she unpacking her suitcase, smelling of hotel and airplane. Me, sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering a hole in the sleeve of my sweater. The tulips, still in their cellophane bag, lying next to me.
“Shouldn’t you join a gym before you join a church?” she asked in her way that was supposed to sound funny but still sounded kind of mean.
“Ha ha,” I said. “No, really, I looked into this church while you were gone and I think it would be good for me. For us both, maybe?”
She carried two black dresses into the closet. “Which church?” she called out.
“The Mormon one,” I answered. “Except I think they like to be called something else now.”
“Weren’t you raised Methodist? Isn’t that breaking some code—switching teams?”
“Going to Methodist summer camp is hardly considered being raised in it, and really, there’s some good stuff about the Mormons. Practical stuff. They’ve got a prophet, they’ve got their own brand of canned food, they know a lot about how to make happy families.”
“I saw The Book of Mormon musical,” she said. “I have an idea what it’s all about.”
“I think that’s like saying you know the Catholic church because you watched The Exorcist,” I said.
She stepped out of the closet, pulled on the corner of her right eye with her index finger, a gesture that sometimes meant I’m thinking hard and sometimes meant shut up already. “Look—we drink, we sleep late on Sundays, we’re registered Democrats. We can’t even have kids. We aren’t exactly ideal candidates for Mormons, and I don’t see you as one of those people who say ‘Jesus Saves’ as casually as ‘Hello.’”
“What if I promise not to say that? Not like that anyway?”
“But you’ll believe it?”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“Do you think you need saved?”
“A little.”
“From who? Me? Evil?”
“I think I need saved from myself.”
“Crazy people need saved from themselves, Matthew. Are you crazy?” She went on with her unpacking, a little bundle of silk underwear in each of her hands.
“Maybe. I mean, I think we all need saving if we want to change, improve. Isn’t that where they start people in any type of recovery program? Surrendering to a higher power?”
“This is a stupid conversation.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to finish unpacking and then I’m going to bed.”
“So, can I join the church then?”
“If you’ll join the gym, too, then whatever.”
“I love you, Katja.”
“I love you, Matthew. Don’t save me though.”
She wasn’t angry. I wasn’t angry. She probably thought it was a thing I’d get excited about for a while and then let pass, but I felt from that time on things wouldn’t be quite the same between us, a line drug in the metaphorical sand of our lives with our metaphorical toe. I’d be on one side, she’d be on the other but we’d both still be on the metaphorical beach, which isn’t altogether unpleasant, I hoped.
—
The missionaries baptized me later the next month, just before Halloween, the same day thirty-seven gray whales washed up on a shore in New Jersey. “Warming oceans,” one media said. “Freezing oceans,” said another. “First evidence of a marine mammal suicide pact,” said a third. Everyone changed their social media profile pictures to a whale. Children bought whale costumes for trick-or-treating. Or maybe they were sharks.
After the baptism, church ward members who had come to watch passed out sugared donuts and some type of slushy lime punch. Elder Bengtzen and Elder VanHorn turned me over to another toothy-smile guy. He was tall and wide with hands the size of buckets but a headful of curly hair like a little boy would have. He was married, had a bunch of kids, all with hair like his. “This is Brother Heller,” they said. “He’s going to be your ministering brother. That means he’ll show you the ropes and help you around church on Sundays.”
Brother Heller gave me a hug, holding on that extra second that makes it more sincere but also kind of awkward. “We’ll take good care of you, Brother Abbot,” he said. I liked the sound of that: Brother. Not quite as smart as Elder but moving up. “How do you feel?”
“Like a new man,” I said.
And I did. It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d felt completely different than I had just a few hours before.
Fifteen years ago, I was 23, starting into my first year of graduate school. I’d accidentally gotten my girlfriend, Amber, pregnant two years before. She was my first, and I couldn’t imagine what to do except marry her, so I did. Never thinking I was too young, all over-caffeinated and eager, feeling I could take on her and a baby just like the enormous course load I was carrying on top of assistant teaching. I was absorbing everything without evidence in those days.
One of my professors was on a grant teaching in Hong Kong and let us stay in his home rent-free in turn for paying the utilities, mowing the grass, and cleaning the pool. Baby Jacob Abbot was born on Christmas Eve. Had it been a girl, we were going to name her Holly.
—
“It’s your turn to get up with him,” Amber said, pushing at my butt with her foot under the covers. “Maaaaat,” she whined. “Go. It’s your turn.” From the crib in the next room I could hear Jacob wailing like a distant siren, intermittent with “Mamamamama.” I made my way, bleary-eyed, across the hall.
Jacob was a little over a year by then, all wobbles and points. “What dat?” he’d say, over and over, waiting for the one-word answer, “Football,” or “Swing,” or “Kitty.”
He looked disappointed it was me and not Amber who had come in, but he held his arms out for me anyway. In one of his hands was the bottle we had put him down with, now empty.
“C’mere, little guy,” I said and hoisted him out of the crib, sniffed the top of his downy head as I always did, his diaper warm and squishy against my forearm. Amber was trying to wean him off bottles in the middle of the night, and I was too tired to rock him back to sleep in his room, so I took him into the living room, sat in the recliner and leaned back, settling him against my chest.
“What dat?” he asked, pointing at my wedding band.
“Ring,” I whispered.
“What dat?”
“Nose,” I whispered, holding and kissing his little finger trying to make its way up with my nostril. “Ssssh, go back to sleep. There will be so much to see and do tomorrow; you need to go night-night now.”
He chewed at the nipple of his empty bottle, his eyes fluttering open and closed, until he finally drifted back into sleep. Then there was just his sweet milky-acetone smell. The even rise and fall of his ribcage. The last thing I saw before closing my own eyes was the moonlight all silvery in his pale hair and eyelashes.
I woke to Amber screaming my name with fearful insistence, the way she would scream it when she saw a spider in the shower, only louder, more urgent. I sat up, trying to remember why I was asleep in the recliner. I patted my vacant chest. Jacob’s bottle was in my lap. The scream didn’t sound like it was coming from our bedroom or the bathroom.
“Amber?”
The back door was open. Amber was standing next to the pool with Buzby, her Yorkie, barking at the water, barking when she screamed my name again, barking at a pair of crows fighting over something in the grass.
“I can’t do it, Matthew!” she said, “Help me! I can’t do it!”
I ran over to her, tried to make sense of what I was seeing—what the light blue X-shape was—the one at the bottom of the pool, motionless, like maybe it was a cushion from one of the patio chairs, or a piece of garbage blown in on the wind. Anything besides what it was.
Amber and I both stood there, paralyzed by our shared fear. I wanted so badly in that moment to be more of a man than I was. I wanted to dive in and lift Jacob out and start CPR the way I had seen it done on television hospital shows: one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, blow. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t be the one to see the other side of that sunken X that I knew was our baby. Didn’t want to see what the water might have done to his face. Instead, I left Amber to get him while I ran next door to the neighbors, yelling for them to call the ambulance, even though we had a phone in our own house—two of them. I could only run outside of myself, lay it in someone else’s lap.
And that was the pattern I continued to follow in the months after Jacob’s death. Even after the paramedics had told us it had been at least a half hour since he fell in, that there was no way we could have saved him even if I’d jumped in at the moment we found him. I blamed the pool company I had hired because I’d gotten too busy to do the cleaning myself, though we hardly used the pool anyway. I blamed them for leaving the safety gate unlocked, fired them, wrote terrible things about them on the internet.
I blamed Buzby, who had been Amber’s dog since she was fourteen, who she’d begged for us to take from her parents when we got married—blamed him for likely nosing the unlocked gate open, always trying to jump in the water the way he did, and Jacob following him around like he was some kind of fabulous toy. I got rid of him the next day on my way to the funeral home. Didn’t even take him to a shelter, just drove through a neighborhood a city over where no one was outside, rolled down the window, threw him out onto the sidewalk, and drove off. I could hear him barking even after I’d turned the corner. I told Amber he ran away and she didn’t seem to care.
I blamed the professor’s house for having those stupid modern doorknobs, inside and out, the ones that looked like horizontal bars; how easy it was for Jacob to learn to use them—a simple push down and click—open door. The week after the funeral I removed every one of the doorknobs, twenty-six of them, heaping them into a lopsided cairn on the bed in the guest room. It was ridiculous, and I knew it was ridiculous, but still expectant it would bring some degree of relief. It didn’t.
I blamed my work hours and heavy course load for exhausting me to the point I didn’t even wake up when Jacob climbed out of the recliner that early morning. Finally, there was no one or thing left to blame besides Amber who had made me get up with him, even though she was the one who always got to take a nap while he did during the day. She was the one who had gotten pregnant with him, birthed him, opened up all these hopeful spaces inside me that were now filling and filling with pain. You either weather things like that together or you don’t. We didn’t.
After months of fighting or crying or silence, I got rid of her, too. Left her a note saying she could file for divorce or I would and an airline ticket back to her parents in Texas. I set it on the kitchen table, and then slept on a friend’s couch for the next three nights. When I went back home, she was gone. I think she wanted to go, was waiting for me to tell her to go. She didn’t try calling or emailing but sent divorce papers in the mail for me to sign. No contest. Irreconcilable differences. No property to divide. No children. I haven’t seen or heard from her since, though I can never seem to separate the memory of her from the memory of Jacob. I had failed them both.
I took a semester off then finished school in a sort of furious-paced trance. After graduation, I moved back home. Time and the distraction of daily living had started to do their healing thing. I got an adjunct position teaching history at Seattle University, supplemented with hours at Ranch Market Organic Grocers, where I quickly worked up to manager, which paid better than teaching history and which I soon did instead of teaching history.
I met Katja a few years after that, while stocking the blood oranges. She had just taken on her first big architecture job, a historic Craftsman restoration. She stood next to me with a deep purple Okinawa potato, sliced in half, held it up to one of the oranges I was placing in a pyramid and said, “Oh, yes. This is the perfect color combination—house,” she wiggled the potato, “door and shutters,” she took an orange from my hand. “You beautiful grocer! This is just what I’ve been looking for!” Then she squished my cheeks between the potato and orange she was still holding and kissed me hard on my forehead. It was the most eager and emotional I would ever see her. Six months later, we were married.
I loved her for a lot of reasons, but mostly for the way she wanted me but didn’t need me—not for money, not for approval, not for comfort. For the way problems never seemed to phase her but enter like she was machinery, get processed and solved, or shredded and spat out. Her parents were German, she said her nature was hard-wired like that. Not to say she wasn’t pleasant, funny at social gatherings and sometimes privately, concerned to a point but fiercely holding to the notion that worry was a thing that only wasted valuable working time. She responded, never reacted.
Against that emotional backdrop, I have never quite known how to tell her that ever since Amber and Jacob, I had been encountering the world as follows:
- Feeling nothing at all. Then
- Feeling everything at once.
Katja didn’t come to my baptism but did take me to the movies afterwards, patted me on my back, said I looked happy. I showed her the new mini-scan card for Total Fitness Gym dangling from my keychain. “Kept my end of the deal,” I said.
—
On my drive to work one morning, three months after my baptism, I saw a pair of missionaries ducked under a bus stop shelter, waiting out the worst of the rain that had started. Their trench coats were beaded in water, backpacks balanced on their knees, people with black umbrellas walking fast, wide arcs around them like they were beggars.
I pulled over and rolled down the window. “Need a ride, Elders?”
When they were settled in my backseat, I told them I knew Elder Bengtzen and Elder VanHorn, who had since been moved to work in different cities but whom they knew. They asked me what I had thought of the big news.
“About the evacuation in Japan?” I asked, “Or the ruined wheat crop in England?” I couldn’t remember what else had gone on this week. It was always something.
“No,” said one of them, “about Church members moving to Missouri. It came out over LDS.org this morning.”
I guess when you’re competing against entire portions of countries being evacuated (I couldn’t remember why now—tidal wave, heat wave, something like that) and England facing the inability to feed its citizens, not to mention three celebrity couples adopting babies—the prophet of the Mormon church making the announcement to move its seventeen million-something members to one location didn’t make it across the mainstream news wires.
I dropped the missionaries off at a house a few blocks away, then drove to my closet-sized manager’s office at Ranch Market Organic Grocers. I pulled up the Church website on my phone and scanned the top story. I called Brother Heller. “Hey, so, what is going on?”
—
The next Saturday, Katja met me for lunch at the Wendy’s near my work where we both liked to dip our French fries in the Frosties. “Would you ever consider moving?” I asked.
“Maybe. For the right job,” she said. “Maybe Europe. I’m happy enough here otherwise.”
“What about Missouri?”
“What about it?”
“Would you ever consider moving to Missouri? It’s really green, like here, but with hills instead of mountains. And fireflies.”
“And?”
“And some people from church are moving there. The whole Church, actually, is moving there. To Independence and a few other surrounding cities.” I dipped my fry. “Not all at once or anything, not like they’re panicked. They’re just going to start putting their houses on the market and seeing about job transfers and such, buying up some bare land. It’ll probably take a decade to get it all done.”
“That sounds like a cult compound to me.”
“Not a cult. Not that kind anyway. It’s all legal. No poison Kool Aid, no orgies, just a new kind of community.”
“Seattle is a community.”
“Seattle is people tolerating each other in close proximity. What I’m talking about is more like, I don’t know, working together and actually enjoying it. Eutopia?”
“Look, Matthew, I appreciate the fact you have a place you feel like you belong. I also appreciate you haven’t been fanatical about it. Other than being gone for a few hours on Sundays and leaving your Book of Mormon on the back of the toilet, you haven’t been all up in my face about it. And I’ve noticed those little things you’ve started doing like holding my hand when we walk and leaving me love notes in my briefcase. I’d like to think they weren’t associated with you joining your church, but I still appreciate them. I do. But moving? Because some old man who says he’s a prophet told you to?”
“But what if it’s true? Would it hurt to go? Don’t you think people thought Noah was crazy until it started to rain?”
She pulled at her eye. “I didn’t marry a religious man, Matthew. It changes the terms of our marriage, as far as I’m concerned.”
“It’s just something to consider. I thought the architect in you would get excited about designing a new city from scratch. Maybe at least think about it?”
“Maybe. But it’s not the end of the world now,” she said. She paused and held one finger up, indicating she wasn’t done talking and then coughed hard, covering her mouth with a yellow napkin. When she pulled it away, there was a quarter-sized spot of blood on it, as red as Wendy’s braids in the picture on her cup. She looked at the napkin, some cross between surprise and agitation in the space between her eyes, then wadded it up and shoved it in her empty fry container. She put her finger down. “It’s always been the end of the world, Matthew.”
—
Katja wasn’t the only one to get the virus. Over the next few weeks, people everywhere started coughing up blood, then bleeding out their tear ducts and their ears. Doctors had come to four conclusions: 1. It wasn’t Ebola. 2. They didn’t know what caused it, therefore they didn’t know how to stop it. 3. It seemed to infect only people with B blood type and wasn’t otherwise contagious. 4. It didn’t appear to be killing anyone, at least not right off. Anemia was growing more common, treated with over-the-counter iron, but no one had died. They just went around jogging and bleeding, riding the train and bleeding, flying kites in Gas Works Park and bleeding. Red scarves that doubled as a kind of blood bib became a popular fashion accessory, worn knotted around the necks of men and women alike.
“Just conspicuously inconvenient,” said the media, “like acne or cold sores.”
Brother Heller stopped by our house one evening, the same evening a massive forest fire burning for weeks claimed the last few acres of rainforest in Brazil, which was also suffering its first ever drought. “The family and I were out on a bike ride,” he said, still sitting atop his green Schwinn on my porch, one foot down for balance. “I told them to ride on home, I wanted to stop by and see how you were.”
“I’m ok,” I said. “Sorry to miss church last Sunday but I’ve been worried about Katja. She’s looks like she’s getting worse, even though she says she feels the same.”
“Rough, I know,” said Brother Heller. “One of my sisters has the virus, too, in Tacoma. Says she’s about gotten used to it already, just wipes up after herself a lot.”
I nodded. I’d bought plastic covers for the bed pillows to make them easier to wipe.
“I just wanted to give you the latest on the Missouri move,” he said. “Bishop said on Sunday that we’re going to start organizing moving truck sharing for people ready to go now—people who are ready to sell their houses or have jobs with easy transfers. I think the family and I are going to go as soon as we can. Lots of construction jobs there right now, lots of houses going up.”
I nodded again.
“Have you made up your mind yet? About going?”
I sighed and shrugged, flopped my palms towards him. “I don’t know,” I said. “My wife…she…we…I don’t know.”
“I understand,” he said. He clapped one of his bucket hands on my shoulder. “I just don’t want you to think you’re forgotten about.”
“No, I know,” I said.
I didn’t feel forgotten about at all. For the first time, I felt I was in the care of something greater than myself. The Church, yes, but more than that—God. A being who could destroy the world all around me but continue to preserve the space under my feet. Who understood how I could be numb to the numbers of people dying in other places every day, but still feel the pain of losing that one all those years ago. Who didn’t condemn me, weak as I was, but championed me, called my weakness humble, teachable.
Katja was right. I was happy. I was doing all those nice, little things for her because of that happiness that now burned in me at a low, unextinguishable constant. I wanted her to feel the happiness, too. I wanted it to shape us into a couple like the Hellers, people who biked together and went to apple orchards together and would move to Missouri together because they believed in the same things.
And, for the first time, I believed I would see Jacob again. That the world and/or my body could end and somehow, I would go on, the best parts of me, and there would be people I loved waiting for me, like a story you thought was over continuing on the other side of the page. A happy ending. Do you know how much easier it is to live, to suffer, when you have that?
With that feeling, came the second feeling, a pressing feeling that I needed to stay with these people who had brought this hope to me. A fear that, maybe, if they all left me, the feeling would leave too—drive off to Missouri in a shared moving truck, and I would be left alone to care for my bleeding wife, feeling hopeless, helpless again.
I remembered one year, when I was eight. It was Fourth of July morning, and I was out riding my bike. The sky was cloudless, bright and hot. It felt full of possibility. I heard my dad yelling my name from up the street, but I didn’t want to stop riding, so I took my time pedaling around the block, past all the barbecue smells and kids running through sprinklers. When I got back, my dad was angry. He was standing by the car, the rest of my family already in their seats. “Now we’re going to be late,” he said. “The parade isn’t going to wait for you.”
I remember being excited that there was an unknown-to-me parade involved, but I also remember the silent minutes afterwards, riding in the backseat, watching the suburbs of Seattle blur to city, thinking about why the parade wouldn’t wait for me. Would it wait if it knew I was coming? If it knew I was sorry I hadn’t stopped riding my bike sooner? Understanding, maybe for the first time, that if I wanted to move, the world would not move for me, I would have to get on moving things.
—
A year passed, almost imperceptible, the way things are in Seattle—a little warmer, a little cooler, more or less rain but always rain, and always greener than not. The seasons marked by flag buntings on porches, jack-o-lanterns lining steps, the huge Christmas tree by the Space Needle, pink rabbits painted on store windows.
Church attendance in my ward was down to a handful of us, maybe forty out of what used to be a congregation of three hundred. Katja got better, then worse, relapse appearing to be a common trait of the virus which had now taken the lives of a few who overdosed on iron supplements. Some prejudices had begun to form against the carriers with a handful of restaurants and high-end clothing stores posting “No Bleeders,” signs. But most people were fine with it. Most people were fine with everything. Half of Antarctica melted rising ocean levels enough to cover half of Australia. Stars that had been in the sky for as long as humans had recorded such things started to disappear. Numerous plant and animal species had gone extinct, though we still had dogs and cats and squirrels and pigeons in the city—everything that was familiar to us, the rest were things to be preserved in a greenhouse or zoo until we could figure it all out—and certainly we would figure it all out, we consoled each other. We always figured it out. Somehow organic produce kept coming in from Mexico, enough to keep my shelves at Ranch Market stocked. And the world just walked around, taking the punches like pugilists. We had become a world of machine-like Katjas, making enough sense of it all to get us to the next day, holding to routine–work, date nights, political debates. People married. People went to therapy. People divorced. People still worried about messing up their kids.
I kept waiting for us to split, as a human race, turn on one another. For great dark-cloaked preachers to rise up and damn us all for causing the destruction with our corruption and vices. But it didn’t happen. It was almost maddening, the way everyone seemed so programed to tolerate that that’s all they did—feigning interest in hearing another’s point of view but un-swayed by it. Arguments about right and wrong ended in head shakes, agreements to disagree, maybe going to get a drink to show there were no hard feelings. It was all relative. There still wasn’t even much news about the Mormon colony, now six million in number, continuing to spread out of Independence, Missouri which had put in a petition to be renamed New Jerusalem. It was a genius of invention, really, the way the prophet had organized ways to house and feed and put to use the skills of all that came from around the world, members or not. “Flourishing,” was how Brother Heller described when we would talk over the phone. “Our house here is twice as big as what we had in Seattle.”
—
“You still want to go to Missouri, don’t you?” Katja asked one night.
We were in the living room, a fire burned down to a low flame, remains of cherry cobbler on two white plates on the coffee table. She was looking over some blueprints, her red scarf pressed to her ear, sopping up the draining blood. I was watching reruns of The Office, unsure of what had prompted her question, but I answered:
“I still think about it, yes,” I said. “Every day. I think about a lot of things. I think about you and I being together forever.”
She laughed. Not a mean laugh, but a laugh of genuine surprise, maybe even discomfort. “Why do you keep thinking into forever? We’ve got this span of our lives to be together and I’m happy for it.”
“So, even after a year and everything that has happened around us, even when I haven’t asked you again or pressured you even a little, you still won’t consider going?”
“I have. And I don’t think it’s right for us. We have jobs. We have a mortgage. We have friends. We’ll make it work here, Matthew. You can make your church work here.”
This was the response I knew was coming but didn’t want to hear. It made my head feel unbalanced on my shoulders, my clothing feel too heavy. For all my patience, for all my praying that she would come around if I just gave her space and love, nothing had changed. Katja had stripped us of all possibility except the here and now. She didn’t see the moving thing we needed to get on. I wanted to say so much but I didn’t know how to make her understand. I couldn’t give her faith. I couldn’t donate it or gift wrap it or inject it into her.
“I know you think I don’t feel,” Katja went on. “But that’s not true. Things hurt me. Not being able to have children hurts the most. I would have loved to give you another baby, knowing how much you grieve the one you lost. I just don’t let you see it because I know you married me for my shiny stoicism. It wouldn’t be fair to you to suddenly have a wife knocked off her feet by pain and longing, the kind I had when I found out I couldn’t get pregnant. It would be like marrying a marathon runner who puts on a hundred pounds—which happens, and which is fine—but it’s still something different than you signed up for. I did you the courtesy of staying the way you expected me to be and now you’re the one who has gone and changed everything.”
I opened my mouth to answer, to say I think I understood. The advancing truth was, I had committed to Katja and I had committed to God, and now whose was I? Because it seemed less and less possible I could hold to both of them much longer, or do what both of them wanted me to.
But at that moment our house was swallowed up by a sink hole.
It was just a small sink hole, relatively.
And we were on the outskirts of it, on our landfill-softened streets in Queen Anne, but part of our ceiling cracked right down on Katja’s head, knocking her unconscious.
I rode in the ambulance with her, in my sock feet. I was holding on to one of the white plates with a few spots of cherry cobbler still on it because I’d spied it in a pile of splintered wood, under a tapestry pillow from the Pottery Barn couch, and thought it might be important to grab because it wasn’t broken. I took the pillow, too, but the paramedics wouldn’t let me bring it on the ambulance. I think I was a little in shock.
After a week at the hospital, the doctors assured me Katja would be fine. Her eyes were still swollen yellow and purple, and she was on oxygen, but they told me her body was just traumatized and needed rest, that she would wake up fully when she was ready. During the day, I talked on the phone with the insurance company, waited on hold for estimates from this place and that while I stared at the bruises on my arms which reminded me of shades of jelly—blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, orange. I slept by Katja’s bed, curled into the visitor’s chair, listening to the beeps and compressions of the machines, to the fainter rhythm of her breathing. Waiting for answers, awake or in dream, to arrive like God running towards me, the response to my prayers rolled into a scroll in his white-bright hand. More than ever, I was a man who needed answers. The mornings were gray with clouds, the nights polluted with light.
Every few hours, Katja would wake and mumble something. Sometimes it was in German. Sometimes I recognized my name or names of her co-workers. Sometimes it was the name of a carpet style or cut of tile:
“Matthew. Matthew?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Make sure you get the Ann Sacks herringbone ordered. Gray and white. For the remodel project on Twelfth. Ok? Macht schnell. Du verstehst?”
“I understand. Don’t worry. Rest.”
“Actually, tell Claire to order it. I can trust her. I don’t know about you.”
She fell back asleep.
I pulled a Kleenex from the box on her nightstand and dabbed at the zig- zag of blood trickling from the inner corners of Katja’s closed eyes. I let my finger trace the raised ridge of her cheekbones, the plain of her forehead. You did it, Matthew, I thought. You hefted that piece of broken beam, you pulled your wife out, you carried her through what was left of your front door. You didn’t leave it to anyone else. You saved her. You. It was probably the only thing she would ever need me to do for her: a revelation that weighted in me like a single nugget of gold in a sluice box, the debris surrounding it washed clean away. In life, in the day-to-dayness of it, she didn’t really need me. Was this my answer? Was this how it arrived? When she rolled over, her back to me, her dark hair shaved down the middle, scalp pink and puckered with stitches, she looked like someone I didn’t know at all. I had passed the part of feeling nothing, now I was feeling everything at once.
On the television, a commercial for toothpaste gave way to a newscaster updating on the latest unrest in Holland where street fighting had broken out over a helium shortage. “Concerns about premature babies and balloons have caused tempers to boil…” he said. I shut it off. It was time. It was as close to the end as possible without going over. I dialed Brother Heller. I wasn’t leaving, I assured myself. I was just going.
JSP Jacobs is a graduate of the Boise State University creative writing program, Tin House Workshop, and former host of The Writers’ Block on Radio Boise. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Nano Fiction, Hawaii Pacific Review, Parent Map, and SmokeLong Quarterly where she was a 2017 Kathy Fish Fellowship finalist. She lives and writes between Huntington Beach, California and Boise, Idaho. You can find her at JSPJacobs.com.
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