How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [85]
I study Rainy’s sunglasses by the light of the moon. She’s placed them on top of her backpack at the foot of her sleeping bag. Now they look just like a small object, but when she wears them and chews her gum, those glasses seem larger than life. Maybe that’s one of the reasons sleep is so nourishing. When we sleep we remove all the masks we wear by day.
Zack is not what I wished for.
I rise up onto my elbows and watch the girls. Joy’s curly hair looks like a halo around her pillow. Amazing that when we sleep, all of us look so vulnerable, like we can’t help but be totally and completely lovable. Just like a photo taken in one second of time, an image captured on film that can be contained, held, and even framed. A smiling face locked in place so that it can’t talk back, rant, confess, or lie. There were times I longed to be just a happy image in a photograph with Lucas.
On my birthday, I didn’t watch the candles on my peach pie and chocolate cake and hope for something to happen between Zack and me. I wished for something else.
Peace. The word is there; it has always been there, in the Bible or on a sign posted to a kitchen door. Peace. I want peace deep inside my heart, lodged so deeply and firmly that no one can ever take it away. How sweet that would be.
But peace and anger can’t coexist. One day I will let the anger go. One day I will no longer care about my scars. One day I will stop letting Lucas control me, because even though we are more than one hundred and fifty miles apart, I’m still drenched in anger at him.
I wonder how Jonas can understand the value of forgiveness and operate in it, while I, with my undergraduate degree and normally functioning brain, have not found out how to do it. Jonas, I think, you are lucky. In so many ways.
If I’d brought my journal along, I would turn on my flashlight and write. But I didn’t dare pack my journal for fear the kids would confiscate it and read it aloud. I would never live that down. If that happened, I would have to leave town.
The crickets sing over the stillness of the mountain. Then I hear the familiar soothing voice—the sound I have grown accustomed to over these six months in the mountains. This owl’s cry is loud and steady, like a heartbeat. I listen over all the other noises around me and imagine which tree he might be in. I wonder what he looks like, how his feathers ruffle as his voice plays out over the breezes—his symphony of evening peace. Does he know the owl from the woods around my cabin? Do they get together and share a rodent or two for dinner, or give each other high fives as they fly from treetop to treetop over the Smokies?
Just before I drift into sleep, I form a prayer to God. It is one of gratitude, the kind my own dad gives. I smile in the darkness, a smile only God sees. Somehow, here, far from my hometown, far away from the life I carefully created for myself in Atlanta, God has given me a gift, and its name is richer and sweeter than any frosted cake. I have been presented with hope.
And I have realized that hope is the necessary beginning. With it, I can hope to one day jump into that river pastors preach and write about. It has a short name, and yet it takes a lifetime to truly navigate this river we call Forgiveness. Why is it so hard, sometimes, to put your hand in God’s?
thirty-eight
Do you want to see, Miss Livingston?” Bubba asks as the sunlight filters through his hair.
“Or are you afraid?” Bobby laughs and pokes the base of the oak tree with a narrow, curvy branch he insists on carrying. He has brushed everyone’s skin with it even though Zack has told him to put it away.
We are on a hike on a woodsy trail. The morning is clear, with cirrus clouds moving across the blue sky. I can almost taste the sky—delicate and pleasing, like an almond butter strudel with a hint of nutmeg.
Earlier our hike took us to an opening that overlooked the gentle slope of the mountain range. The mountains were an array of scarlet, gold, and amber. As I breathed in the warm air and turned my face to the