Pascal's Wager (20 page)

“Try number eleven,” I said to Tabitha, and then I hurried in after her.

Mother was opening and closing cabinet doors and growing suffer by the minute.

“What are you looking for?” I said. “Are you hungry?”

She nodded.

“Okay, what do you usually eat for a snack?” I opened the
refrigerator and peered in. “You want some…leftover mortadella?”

I pulled my head out of the refrigerator and looked around. She was gone.

With visions of her diving into the now-empty koi pond dancing in my head, I broke for the hall. From the study, I heard Tabitha's husky voice bubbling out a “Hi!”

This
was going to be a trip.

I got to the study just in time to see my mother dipping her hand into the bag of Doritos Tabitha was holding. “Mother, no!” I said.

“Oh, it's okay She can have some,” Tabitha said. She wrinkled her freckled nose at Mother. “Aren't they good? Sour cream ranch—they're totally my favorite.”

I had never known them to be “totally my mother's favorite,” but she was chowing down on them as if she'd been craving them all day. As far as I knew, she had never put a morsel of junk food into her mouth until that moment.

“I'm sorry, Tabitha,” I said. “She doesn't know what she's doing.”

Tabitha gave me a blank look and then looked back at Mother. “Well, she's not bothering me. Can she just sit here while we work? Or do you need me to go? I can go—”

I looked at my mother, too. She popped another chip into her mouth and then giggled at Tabitha.

“She's sweet,” Tabitha said. “Can't she stay?”

“She'll probably only sit there for about two minutes,” I said. “She doesn't stay put for long.”

But Mother remained, calmly polishing off the rest of Tabitha's chips while I explained second-order equations. If I hadn't known better, I'd have said she did it just to make a liar out of me. When we finished, Tabitha picked up one of Mother's hands and pressed it between hers.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said. “I know you've been sick, and I'm praying for you. God's with you, you know.”

I watched my mother closely. If anything was going to stir her up, it was going to be a comment like that.

But Mother just watched Tabitha with that same flat expression she'd worn while I was rattling on about differential calculus. It didn't matter what we said. She was there for the Doritos.

It may have been my most profoundly disturbing thought yet.

That was all Sam and I talked about up on the Loop that week. It was no longer a question of
whether
my mother still had a soul. It was now a matter of my proving
that
she had one. Otherwise, she was on a par with one of the koi we had just transferred from one pond to another so somebody would take care of it.

“So, the Wager is working,” Sam said to me late Friday afternoon. We'd slipped off the beaten path again and were perched on what Sam insisted on calling the Jill Tree.

“What do you mean it's working?” I said. “I don't see it working. In the first place, I don't even know
how
to act as if there's a God.”

“You're doing it.”

“How am I doing it?”

“You've turned your whole life upside down this week for your mother.”

“Like I had a choice.”

“You did. You could have hired a temporary caretaker.”

“I couldn't face another Freda.”

“Could you have a year ago? Six months ago? Even six weeks ago?

“But what real difference is it making? Mother doesn't care who's there with her, as long as we feed her and keep her from flushing lingerie down the john. And you still can't answer this question: If there's a God, how could there possibly be this—this injustice—this brilliant woman reduced to a zombie stealing a kid's Doritos?”

Sam inched forward on the horizontal trunk. “Let's clarify,” he said. “If we say that there is
in
justice, we can only be sure of that if we know that there is justice itself. Correct?”

“What do you mean? Like we can't know if we're unhappy unless we know what happy is?”

He grinned. “You should be going for a doctorate in philosophy. Forget all that math nonsense.”

“Move on, Blaze,” I said.

“All right, if there is injustice, then it must be that there is true justice for it to be a defect of.”

I traced that knot mentally and nodded.

“Now, does true justice exist?”

“Theoretically.”

“But in reality? In practice?”

“Not that I've ever seen,” I said.

“And I'm sure most people would agree with you. Ergo, if there has to be true justice—”

“Did you just say
ergo?
Tell me you didn't actually use the word
ergo.”

“Yes, I did. Now stop breaking my train of thought. If there has to be true justice, and this true justice is not found on earth or in man—” his eyes glowed—“it must exist in heaven and in God.”

“You can't just take everything and turn it into God,” I said.

“Sure I can,” he said, “because God's already in it.”

I didn't answer right away I had a half-dozen sarcastic retorts just waiting to fire at him. But as I flipped through them, they merely turned over on themselves, like cards in a Rolodex file.

“You know what's really maddening?” I said.

Sam shook his head.

“That I have to admit that if I could see just one sign that ‘God' was making any of this better, I would want it all to be true. I would want God to exist.”

“Why is that maddening?”

“Because I hate to be wrong. I would have to admit that I've been wrong all this time.”

“If you don't ever want to be wrong,” Sam said, “then you
sure
don't want to be wrong about God.” His grin widened and he got closer to me, so that I could almost feel the glow in his eyes. “What kind of sign are you looking for? What is it that you want to see?

“I don't know.”

“Then how will you know it's a sign when you see it? Maybe you've already had signs and you didn't recognize them.”

“Do you seriously think that?” I said.

“Look, Jill,” he said. “I can't talk you into God. Matter of fact, I can't talk you into anything. Nobody can.”

“At least you know that much,” I said, grinning.

“I know this, too: If you don't want to believe in God, you won't. But you want to—you said it yourself.”

“I
might
want to,” I said. “But wanting isn't getting. I'm thirty years old, Blaze—I've figured that out.”

“And I'm thirty-five, and I've figured out two things.” He raised a finger.
“Only
those who seek God find Him.” He raised another one. “And
all
those who seek God find Him. Since the signs of God can only be seen by those who seek Him, He stays partially hidden.”

“You're making this up as you go along!” I said, laughing.

But his face was sober. Only his eyes still danced.

“God doesn't want the seeing-is-believing approach,” he said.

I could feel my face growing sober, too—and something like anger brewing in my heart.

“Then what the heck does He want?” I said. “I've just about given up everything that was important to me. I'm down to begging for answers—and for me that is rock bottom. I'm sick of these intellectual arguments and these faith experiments that tear me apart! What does He want me to do?”

Sam took me firmly by both shoulders. I was crying. I was
yelling loud enough for Deputy Dog to hear me. I was practically tearing my hair out by the roots. And I wasn't caring that I was doing any of it in front of him.

“You tell me what it is He wants me to do!” I cried again.

Sam put his arms around me and held me tight, so that no amount of fighting could push him away.

“He wants you to do what you're doing right now,” he said into my hair. “He wants you to let Him have it. He wants you to let Him have it all.”

S
am followed me home from the Loop in his car, just to make sure I was all right, he said. That was despite my protests that I had only lost it for a few minutes and I was fine now. We both knew I was lying.

He walked me to the door and stood looking down at me, hands lazily parked in his pockets.

“You going to be all right tomorrow?” he said. “If tonight is any indication, probably not.”

“So go ahead and cry through the whole ordeal. I'm sure they've seen family members do that before.”

“No one but you has ever seen me do that or ever will,” I said. “You tell anybody and I'll cut your heart out.”

He didn't respond. In fact, he looked rather shyly at the toe of his running shoe, which he was using to guide a beetle away from the doormat. When he looked up at me, his smile was soft.

“Too late,” he said. “I think you've already cut my heart out.” Then he took my face in both hands and kissed me, and I didn't push him away. I kissed him back until I could no longer breathe.

“I'll be praying for you tomorrow,” he said.

I stayed on the front porch long after he was gone, mentally turning myself inside out trying to deny the potential for passion. I lost.

I took Mother to Hopewell the next morning. Burl followed in his pickup truck with suitcases, a box of decor I'd selected for her
room, and the armchair from the guest room that she sat in at the window. Max had stood waving from the doorway, giving every indication that his heart was breaking in half.

I, on the other hand, was the picture of control. It was the first time I'd had Mother out of the yard since her last appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, and she'd definitely declined since then. My main focus was to keep her from stealing some poor unsuspecting resident's breakfast.

The focus shifted slightly when we pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the ignition.

“Okay,” I said, “here we are.”

She sat staring out the side window while I rooted around behind the seat for my purse.

“I'll come around to that side and let you out—” I started to say. But I stopped.

Mother was pointing her index finger toward the building.

“What?” I said.

She turned to me, and it was all I could do not to gasp. Her flat expression had pulled together into one of pure bewilderment. For the flash of a second, her eyes were once again their intense blue, and they were demanding answers.

“This is the Hopewell Care Center,” I said. I could hear my voice growing louder, my pace slowing, as if I were talking to someone who didn't speak English. “Look, Mother, you're going to be staying here now. It's a great place, and they're really going to—”

To what? Keep you from jumping out the window? From taking a dive into the nearest fishbowl?

She was still watching me, her square jaw set expectantly. A familiar sense of tension seeped into me, and I scrambled for better vocabulary, more intelligent phrases.

“It's about your quality of life,” I said. “Basically, you don't have any at home. This is going to be your home now. Trust me. I've analyzed this by every method known to man and then some.”

I felt as if I were talking to the old Liz McGavock, the one who
watched
my words as well as heard them, and then pounced on them like a lioness.

But she turned slowly to look at the building again, and one hand jerked up and pointed vaguely in its direction.

“Yeah,” I said. “That's the place.”

When she turned back to me, her face was expressionless once again, her eyes almost inanimate. But from then until we stepped inside the building, she never took them off me, and even then they darted back to me occasionally, somehow questioning even in their lifelessness.

The entrance hall was more crowded as we walked in than it had been the Saturday before. There were several patients at the aquarium, and, remembering the koi pond incident, I hurried Mother past it to the office. Monique was waiting for us and led us briskly to the assisted residents' wing, where I said to Mother, “This is where you'll be—not back there.”

Mother was asleep on the bed about thirty seconds after Monique showed us to her room. I was almost finished putting her things away when Burl came in with the chair. I'd forgotten he was even with us. He didn't seem to mind. He appeared to be quite comfortable as he positioned the chair facing the window and then checked the lock and screen, probably to make sure Mother couldn't pull one of her Houdini acts in the middle of the night.

“Nice place,” he said to me.

“I thought so,” I said. And then suddenly that sounded imperious to me, as if Burl were some underling and I was chiding him for being so impertinent as to validate my choice. I turned to him. “You think she'll be all right here, don't you? I mean, don't you think her quality of life was suffering at home?”

Burl folded his hands behind his back. His face was its usual deadpan, but his eyes seemed almost annoyed.

“What does that mean exactly—‘quality of life'?” he said.

“Well. I see it as how much enjoyment she's getting out of
being alive. It can't be that pleasant, sitting in a chair staring out the window all day. To me, that's why she gets up all of a sudden and goes running around? She's probably looking for something to do. Here they have things for her to do that are appropriate to her condition.”

Burl gave a soft grunt. “I hear about quality of life all the time at the hospital.”

“I guess you would.”

“They use it like it means how much sex and money you have.”

“Excuse me?” I could feel my eyebrows twisting.

“Seems like if you can't use your money and your power or can't bed somebody down once in a while, you haven't got a life.”

Aside from the fact that it was the most I'd heard Burl speak at one time, I was intrigued.

“Your mother,” he went on, “she never talked about quality of life.”

“You talked about this often?” I said. I hoped I didn't sound skeptical, because I didn't feel that way. It was beginning to dawn on me that people read me the way I had always read my mother, and I wasn't too crazy about the idea.

“Most every evening we took a coffee break together if she was still there and she wasn't too busy,” Burl said. “She never said anything like ‘they ought to just take this person off life support because he doesn't have any quality of life left.'” He shifted his eyes over to Mother, who was snoring softly on the bed. “She thinks every life is worth saving, so I guess that means she thinks suffering has quality. If it doesn't, then what's her whole life been about up to now?”

I knew I was staring at him, but I didn't attempt to stop. If I had, I would have missed his look, which covered my mother like a warm blanket as she slept. He didn't shake his head as if to say, “What a shame. What a waste.” He gazed at her out of a face etched with wisdom. I realized then that he knew her the way I
didn't, the way no one did—maybe not even Max. It made me feel small and cold.

She woke up shortly thereafter and went straight to the chair, sat down, and looked out the window.

“I think you're gonna like it here, Doc,” Burl said. He smiled at her, and the web of lines on his face came to life. “I've got to go now, but I'll be back. You want anything?”

She looked at him and shook her head.

“If you think of anything, you just tell your daughter. I'll be seein' her. There's a couple things I still need to take care of around your house.”

“Thank you,” I said to him as he started in his deliberate way for the door. “That seems so inadequate. You've done so much.”

“I'm not done,” he said. And then he left.

With Burl gone, I was suddenly at a loss for what to do or say. Mother was contentedly studying the view outside her window. Everything had been organized, tidied, and straightened, and I was growing uncomfortable in the silence and awkwardness of the moment. When Monique walked in the door, I could have kissed her feet.

“If you want to leave now,” she said to me, “I think that would be fine. You're doing all right for the moment, aren't you, Dr. McGavock?”

Mother didn't answer.

“I think you can take that as a yes,” I said.

Monique stepped out into the hall. I crouched beside my mother's chair, and she moved her eyes lifelessly toward me. I didn't want to leave her here, and yet there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of this place—and take her with me, or not take her with me. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted everything to go back to the way it was before this…this…
thing
had wrecked our lives. Before I'd ever gotten lumps in my throat or wrestled with indecision or felt the burn of shame for my own coldness.

“I have to go,” I said. “But I'll be back tomorrow. By then, you'll be running this place. Just cut them a little slack the first day, okay?”

She blinked and then turned again to look out the window. I grabbed my purse and stood up.

“See you tomorrow?” I said. “I'll try not to interrupt your bridge game.”

Somehow I made it out the door and several steps down the hall. Monique was standing at the corner, and she smiled and pointed behind me.

“Someone's following you,” she said.

I turned around. Mother was coming toward me at a brisk clip, looking for all the world as if she were rushing a lab report to Ted Lyons.

“What is it?” I said to her.

She stopped beside me and with a jerk pointed her finger on down the hall.

“Yeah, I'm leaving,” I said. I looked helplessly at Monique. She just nodded. What that was supposed to tell me, I hadn't a clue. “Like I told you,” I said to Mother, “you're staying here. It's the best thing.”

She didn't appear puzzled. She merely stood there, looking down the hall, pointing at some nebulous destination with a jerky finger.

“You know what, Dr. McGavock?” Monique said finally—a good two minutes after she should have intervened, in my opinion. “I have a lot to show you. Why don't we get started right now and let Jill go take care of business?”

At least, I think that's what she said. I said good-bye to my mother one more time and then moved away at a near gallop. All I could hear were my own words, spoken as if I knew for a fact that they were true.
It's the best thing
, I had told her.
It's the best thing
.

But I no more knew that leaving her there to stand like a
mannequin with a ping-pong paddle in her hand was the best thing than I knew whether I was going to make it out the front door without throwing up into the nearest trash can.

I thought about it until I could no longer stand the sound of it in my head.
It's the best thing
. Then I got into the Miata and punched in a number on my cell phone.

“Blaze?” I said when Sam answered. “I need to see you.”

We met at Denny's just down the street from Hopewell, Sam looking sleepy-eyed and boyish with his curly hair unbrushed and a red Stanford T-shirt thrown over a pair of chinos. But his mind was obviously wide awake as he ordered us coffee and then leaned intently toward me.

“It didn't go well?” he said.

I filled him in.

“Okay, Blaze,” I said when I was through. “Where does God fit into that?”

He waited for the waitress to drop off our coffee. Then he sipped his thoughtfully while I dumped three packets of Sweet 'n Low into mine and stirred like I was trying to dissolve sand.

“I think we need to get clearer on what you can expect from God,” Sam said. He nodded at my coffee mug. “You're going to get carpal tunnel.”

I looked sheepishly at my hand and put the spoon on the table. “Okay, let's have it.”

“If you're looking for a God who authors mathematical truths and the order of the elements and that's it, go read Epicurus.”

“Nah. I've got the mathematical truths handled.”

“If you want a God who grants the wishes of the people who worship him with great wealth and happy days, talk to the people who see God as some kind of Fairy Godfather.”

I gave a half-laugh. “That doesn't sounds so bad. Sign me up for that.”

“I can sign you up, but it isn't going to happen. That isn't God.”

I stared miserably into my coffee. “Then you better tell me what God
is
, Blaze,” I said. “At this point, I'm open to anything.”

Sam pushed his own coffee aside so he could lean farther across the table. “You mind if we go back to Pascal?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, picture old Blaise sitting in his apartment brooding over the fact that his belief in God was merely intellectual. That kept him in a quandary as to how to satisfy the demands of both God and the world as a man of his station in life was expected to do.” Sam grinned. “There were certain ‘moral compromises' the men of his class allowed themselves to make. Anyway, suddenly he experiences God—for about two hours.”

“Experiences how?”

“He had a vision.”

“A vision,” I said. “Okay.”

“He called it ‘the night of fire.' God apparently came to him in flames and told him what eternal life is: that he should know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent. Pascal came out of that encounter a completely changed man—how did he put it? In ‘total submission to Jesus Christ. Eternally in bliss for a day of hard training in this world.'” Sam looked at me, his eyes glowing as if he had just seen a vision himself. “My favorite part of the story is that nobody even knew about the vision until nine years later when he died. His servant was going through his clothes and he noticed what appeared to be extra padding sewn into his doublet. Turns out it was a piece of parchment and wrapped inside it was a sheet of paper where Blaise had written an account of his night of fire. He evidently carried it around with him in his jacket everywhere he went.”