The classroom door was only a hallway away when she set down her book bag and pulled her shaking hands out of her pockets. She rubbed them together furiously, trying to hide the inexplicable trembling from other academic passersby. She forced herself to stand still and take four deep breaths to center herself while she ashamedly tried to forget about how quickly she had averted her eyes and turned cold. The deaf student standing near the ancient building’s door was just trying to teach a hearing friend some signs. She had to make herself forget incidents like these so she didn’t drown in self-disgust. She gently blew a warm breath into her palms and began rubbing them together again before she picked up her purple travel mug and book bag off the linoleum floor and walked to the classroom door.
Every once in a while a person finds themselves pursuing a passion tied inseparably to something painful and private. For Anna, this was her class, Religion 417: Two Testaments, Vengeance versus Forgiveness. The professor had been able to offer a course on her fascination and she’d made sure to be the first one signed up for it. It wasn’t necessarily the religious aspect that had drawn her in, but the forgiveness. She’d seen enough nightmares in life to make her continually ask, “I wonder what pain they must have been going through to want to inflict so much pain on others.” By taking this class, she’d hoped to get some more perspective from someone hopefully older and wiser than she.
She sat down in a plastic chair in the back row by the beautiful and huge old windows. She had started the semester sitting in the front row, though she had quickly found it necessary to be out of sight. She felt in her bag for the metal spiral and pulled out her notebook for the class. She flipped it open to the middle and was discouraged to find empty paper. Her other notebooks were almost full of math and Spanish notes by now. She sighed and flipped back to the last page she’d written on—only seven pages or so into the notebook.
She hadn’t noticed Professor Aible enter the room, but suddenly he was at the unsteady wooden podium. Please don’t let me zone out again, she thought as he smoothed down his graying beard and mustache. He cleared his throat and began the lecture.
“Alright, my scholars, it is a blustery winter morning and I thank you all for making the effort to come today, as it appears the majority of the class could not,” he smirked warmly and the students smiled back. “Let’s begin with where we left off last time—a few stories of vengeance in the Old Testament. How about we start off with Absalom seeking revenge for his younger sister…” As the professor called on volunteering students, the details started to simultaneously fade and simmer into her imagination…
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They took Dad away in the cop car this afternoon. Police had been searching the property since morning when Thomas still hadn’t shown up at his parents’ house. They’d been looking mostly in town, the roller skating rink, his friends’ houses, the soccer fields. As hours passed, it had become clear that the last place he’d been was our farm yesterday around 4pm. We’d never seen this kind of excitement in our county. Only one person had ever gone missing since we could remember, and that was Mrs. Daley’s husband about six years back; but it wasn’t really a missing person situation, more of a quicker and cheaper alternative to divorce.
Thomas was seventeen, awkwardly tall with stark black hair, and deaf. He’d shown up a week ago to help out on the farm. Mom usually took care of the farm stuff—it was just a couple of mostly wooded acres with two fenced areas along the driveway. It was for the handful of horses they’d rescued since they’d moved out of the town. But Mom was pregnant now and Dad had talked her out of repairing and painting the fences. So Mom had called up Mary Stephenson and asked if her boy Thomas would be interested in some farm work. Mom couldn’t help but grin when she’d gotten off the phone—apparently Mrs. Stephenson was ecstatic about the opportunity for Thomas to “be a grown up and get some experiences under his belt.” Mom said she was sure she meant to say “work experience,” but it was general knowledge that Thomas had led a relatively private life.
So Thomas had shown up for his first day of work last week with his mother and father, and Mom had invited them all in and sat at the table learning a few hand signs. Anna had wandered in then, all of four years, enthusiastically asking to learn a sign. So before the Stephenson parents headed back home, they taught her “alligator” and she spent a good portion of the day chomping her arms at Thomas.
Watching Thomas pick up the first can of black fence paint and one of the wide brushes, Anna bounced over to Mom and brushed her pale curls off her sweaty brow. “Mom, Mom, Mom—,” she sputtered, not taking her eyes off the paint can.
“Stop, Anna. Look at me and think about what you’re trying to say,” Mom reminded her.
Anna took a breath, looked up at her mother, and asked, “Can I help? Please? Please, can I help?” She was constantly at Mom’s side around the little farm, asking to help with everything, most of which she had to be told no. She also insisted on doing everything possible by herself, which explained the purple sock on her left foot and the Minnie Mouse sock on her right.
“Honey, that’s wonderful that you want to help, but this is Thomas’s job. If he wants your help, that’s fine with me, but you have to ask him,” she answered. Anna started a run, but hopped back around to face her mother.
“Umm, Mom…” she started.
“Why don’t we use the notepaper to ask him, honey?” Mom suggested. Anna’s face lit up once again and she loudly pattered over to the kitchen table where they had been seated earlier. Mom walked over to catch Thomas before he headed out the door. He looked confused, but Mom smiled and pointed to the wooden chair he’d just gotten up from and she sat down to help Anna sound out her request in red crayon.
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As they had pulled away down the driveway with the red and blue lights flashing and siren silent, we all watched to see Dad go by in the back seat, hands cuffed in front—since he’d been cooperative and the detective had felt sympathy for him. Everyone stared except Mom. She stood there, belly large, face empty. It was the same face Dad was wearing as the tires crunched slowly over the gravel to the main road. We had just watched the other vehicle with lights flashing go down that same road only an hour or so before. But that time Mom’s and Dad’s faces had been revealing pure shock, with a touch of queasiness, as the coroner loaded up the black plastic bag bulging with haunting outlines of elbows and knees. Anna stood behind Mom, looking curiously at the scene through the gap between her mother’s hip and quivering left hand.
His body had been in the woods, just past a small creek, less than fifty feet away from the fence. They’d found him within minutes of discovering an open paint can in a clearing, a brush handle stuck out, leaning against the side. He’d been shoved under a white pine, with a pathetic scattering of pine needles drizzled over him. A larger mound of needles had surrounded his head, soaking up the red that now slowly seeped from the massive gashes under his black hair.
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“Why do you talk with your hands, Thomas?” she asked him as they made their way to the front gate. The horses followed them as they walked along the gray sparkling rocks past the oak trees lining the driveway. When he didn’t answer, she looked up at his face and saw him staring ahead, no reaction. Then she giggled and tugged at his shirt hem, remembering. He turned his head and smiled slightly, waiting for her to say something. She thought back to her mother’s instructions and repeated her question, this time very slowly. He watched her small mouth move, forming bubbles of syllables with her lips. He relaxed, then, looking at her with a thoughtful smile. He squinted at nothing for a moment, then nodded and knelt down in front of her. He snapped his fingers next to his ear three times, then shook his head and shrugged.
“Oh, you can’t hear anything?” she understood. He nodded. Her mother had explained this already, but it hadn’t sunk in until this demonstration. He stayed knelt, and kept looking at her honest, curious face for a few seconds longer. Then he got to his feet, picked up the paint can too heavy for her to carry (though she’d tried) and took her hand not holding the paint brushes as they continued down the path.
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When the police were heading down the road to their house, Mom had just gotten off the phone with a nearly-incomprehensible Mrs. Stephenson. She left her hand on the receiver for a moment while she thought about what she’d just heard.
“Hun, Thomas has gone missing,” she told Dad.
“What?” he didn’t understand.
“That was Mary on the phone. He never came home last night.”
“Ah Jesus… Did she call the police?” his eyebrows clinched in sympathy.
“Yeah. They’ve searched all over town already. She asked if we’d seen him and wanted to let us know the officers are headed over here to check the woods in case…” she couldn’t finish. They looked at each other in the hope that the other would know what to say. “Oh God, if something ever happened to our babies…” He stopped her with a head shake and held her.
“Nothing’s happened to him. And our babies are safe. Alex is sleeping in upstairs like any fourteen-year-old boy on a Saturday, and Anna’s in the TV room, coloring,” he soothed, rubbing her belly.
When the patrol cars pulled up to the front of the house, Mom and Dad were outside to greet them in their farm coats and slip-on barn shoes.
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More officers had arrived and were ducking under police tape around the horse shed as the body rode away in the coroner’s truck. One deputy was stationed inside the house, but he’d met the family at a sheriff’s office barbecue a month before and seemed uncomfortable standing over the couple. He excused himself to the porch to smoke instead.
Mom and Dad sat silently at the kitchen table for a while longer.
“Well, they’ll be out there for a while, and we can’t sit here and wait for them,” Dad said. She nodded and stood slowly, hand on the table for support. “Let’s go sit with Anna,” he suggested, and they walked thoughtlessly to the TV room. As they lowered themselves onto the wool plaid couch cushions, they took deep breaths and tried to smile before they spoke.
“Hey Anna, whatcha drawin?” Mom asked her lightly.
Anna didn’t respond immediately; she was deeply focused on her paper, filling in a circle. “Alex and Thomas,” she finally said.
“Really?” Mom and Dad stared at each other, not breathing.
“Yup.”
After swallowing the seeming stone in his throat, Dad asked quietly, “Can I see?”
“Yup.” She jumped up, dropping the red crayon to the carpet, wiped her hair out of her eyes, and handed it to him. “See, that’s Alex, there.” Then she plopped back to her spot, and glued herself to the singing Muppets on the television.
Mom covered her mouth quickly while Dad’s head turned to stare hopelessly in the direction of his son’s room. Where she had pointed, a stick figure drawn in gold stood tall under the unsteady handwriting “HERO,” as a black stick figure lay under a green tree resting on a pillow of red.
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“Why is Mom crying?” Anna looked up worried at her father. At this, her mother wiped her eyes and forced a smile.
“Honey, it’s okay. I just need you to tell us the truth. Is there something you need to tell us?” she tried to ask it in the same voice as when she’d found her broken hair clip in the trash the day before. She tried to show that she was Mommy, that baby Anna could tell her anything, as long as she only told the truth. She tried to keep her face looking simply curious; she wanted to convey nothing that was going on in her mind—none of the horrible places and cruel people that she imagined might lie ahead for her son. She looked at her little girl with a lying face. “Honey, it’s okay. Has something happened you need to tell us about?”
Anna’s chin finally dropped to her chest. She didn’t cry—she rarely cried. She swallowed, took a breath, and looked up at her parents without raising her head. “Thomas made me promise not to tell,” she started wringing her left pinkie finger with her other hand. “But I don’t like the way he touches me when we’re in the woods…” her voice began to trail off as she fidgeted her feet. “Alex got mad, too, when he came into the woods after he got off the bus yesterday. He got really mad. He made Thomas take a nap, and I put leaves on him to make him better. He told me everything’d be okay now, though…”
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Raging down the stairs from his boy’s bedroom, her father hissed through gritted teeth, “It should’ve been me. I should’ve been the one to bash his head into that tree.”
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Late that night, Mom’s empty face had faded back to feeling and coherent thoughts had returned to her brain. Anna was scared in the sheriff’s office. But Mom had sat with her for over two hours, telling her how important it was for her to tell this nice man exactly what had happened. “…And we can go to bed?” she finally sniffed.
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Professor Aible stopped speaking suddenly, and Anna blinked her eyes. Hard. She took a deep breath and shoved her hand into her coat pocket, looking for something to rub her fingers over. She’d learned this technique a couple years ago as a freshman when her flashbacks had gotten worse from the stress of moving into the dorms. Reminding her senses where she was, they’d called it.
She allowed her eyes to wander the room—covering another sense. She counted the other students, seven boys and four girls. She looked up at the beige vaulted ceilings and stretched her eyes open some more. Her purple travel mug of black tea had gone cold and she leaned over it to sniff the remaining aromas. She came across the clock and realized she’d lost forty minutes this time. Class was about to end. She’d been incredibly looking forward to taking this class, having always advocated for compassion and perspective, though it seemed she was never going to make it through an entire lecture.
“So, to review once more, scholars, what was the significance of David’s son, Absalom?” The professor gently looked around with a half-smile. “Yes, Caleb!”
“Absalom murdered his sister’s rapist,” a disheveled redhead across the room answered.
“Very good. And a bit of trivia before you go; Absalom is related to the name ‘Axel,’ not to be confused with Alex, which we know is the name for ‘defender’. But similar vein, I suppose.” And with that, he waved his arm elegantly toward the heavy wooden double doors and notebooks started stuffing themselves into book bags.
As she closed her empty notes up, she stretched and quickly shook her blonde curls to try to clear her head. Visions of her mother’s quiet tears over the miscarriage before Anna forced the true version of the past to the foreground. Luckily the sense training made it possible to handle the twisted reality: the undeserved freedom of a dark-haired boy and the painful secret of a little girl with no one to protect her from a disturbed teen in the woods. Forgiveness has its merits, she thought as she rose from her chair. But in hard times, even she felt the guilty pleasure of an altered daydream was more comforting than the honest memory… with no older brother, no bulging black bag, and no gold crayon.
Fall 2009
