Pascal's Wager (23 page)

“Not entirely. Listen, I have to know this: Do you think I was being dishonest with you because I didn't tell you about my job opportunity? I mean, I've been thinking about it since before we met. It's not like it came out of the blue. I had plenty of chances to tell you.”

“No,” I said. “Now, if at some point I had said, ‘Gee, Blaze, I
guess you're set here for life, huh?' and you'd just said, ‘Yeah, I have no plans to move elsewhere,' then, yes, I would've said you weren't honest. Not that it's any of my business—”

“But it
is
your business. At least, I want it to be your business.”

He picked up one of my hands and kneaded it between his. It was another one of those firm holds I couldn't have gotten out of if I'd tried—and I didn't try.

“Up until the day before I left, I didn't think there was any reason to tell you. We were focusing on you. But then it all happened at once—at least for me.”

Did I miss it?
I wanted to say. But I knew that came from old habits. Something else, something new and deep, told me to shut up and nod.

“We were sitting in Denny's,” he said, “and I saw it all in one piece: you so close to touching God, and me so close to touching you, really touching you.”

I did pull my hand back then. “This was some goal you had?”

“No,” he said. “It was something that happened in spite of my goal—which was to keep myself from falling in love with you.”

“Oh,” I said—eloquently.

Sam put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me up to his face. “I love you, Jill,” he said.

I didn't have to answer him. I told him in the kiss.

He pulled away just far enough to look at me. “Okay, let me just say this,” he said. “If they offered me the job at Wheaton and I accepted, would you think about going with me?” He put a finger to my lips, which had already started moving. “It wouldn't be until June, and by then you'll be finished with your degree. I'm just planting a seed. There are a lot of ifs involved anyway, but can you even think about it?”

It was as if my mouth were frozen. I did manage to get out: “Is this a marriage proposal?”

“I just know I liked everything about Wheaton except that you weren't there.”

“So—you're asking me to—do what?”

“I'm just telling you how I feel and asking you to think about it. That's all.”

I gave him a numb nod, and he grinned—like a kid grins when his mom has said “maybe.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let's just put that on the back burner for now. I want to hear about you.”

“Not so fast, Blaze,” I said. “I still don't get why you didn't tell me about this when we talked before you left. Or why you didn't call me from there. Why all the secrecy?”

The grin faded. He looked more somber than I had ever seen him.

“Because I was scared to death of what you'd say. I'm still scared.” He touched my cheek. “I want you in my life.”

The questions lined up in my head, jostling for position.
I thought you wanted a church lady, Blaze. What happened to that? You want me to go find a teaching position in Podunk, Illinois, so I can be close to you even though you can't even define our relationship? You think you're the only one who has ifs?

But I suddenly hated all of those questions, and I hated the fact that they had even entered my head. This man who was earnestly searching my face with his eyes—this man didn't deserve to have any of those questions hurled at him.

“What are you thinking?” Sam said. “Or should I ask?”

“I'm thinking…I want to tell you what's happened with my mother.”

“Tell me,” he said. He looked longingly in the direction of the kitchen. “You got any Max meals we could thaw out while we're talking? I haven't eaten all day.”

While I warmed up the last of the cappellacci with meat sauce in the microwave, I filled Sam in. The more I talked, the more of it came to me.

After putting the plate down in front of him, I sank into the chair opposite him, another entire piece forming in my head.

“What?” he said.

“Do you think she's still trying to practice medicine?”

“It sounds like it.”

“But do you think that's just an automatic reflex on her part? If I had Pick's, I might write equations on the walls. If you had it, you might still…”

He laughed. “Yeah, just exactly what is it that I do, anyway?”

“The point is, when people have dementia, do they keep doing what they did for a while, just out of habit?”

“Did you read anything about that in the literature?”

I shook my head. “Besides that, Mother hasn't actually seen patients for twenty-some years, except for looking at my sore throats and saying, ‘You'll live. Go to school.'”

“So you're saying this wouldn't be a habit.”

“Not unless her brain's going back to when she was in med school or something.”

Sam watched me as he chewed. Then he said, “I hear another possibility in there somewhere. It could just be habit. Or—?”

“Or she's consciously clinging to her mind.”

“Or?”

“Or her soul,” I said. I put a hand up. “Don't start doing your little end zone dance, Blaze. I'm just considering it as a possibility.
If she
has a soul that's going to transcend everything—death, dementia, disease, whatever—then that's where her drive to heal and preserve life could possibly be. Just possibly.” I shook my head. “But then I think about her trying to flush her nylons down the toilet and I'm not so sure.”

“Yeah, well, I'm voting that not only is she clinging to her soul, but she's trying to tell
you
she still has a soul.” Sam put down his fork and leaned toward me. “Let me just put this out there: Maybe your mother is taking Pascal up on his wager.”

“If you had known my mother when she was in her right mind, you wouldn't even suggest that.”

The grin went earlobe to earlobe. “I know you in your right
mind, and you took him up on it. I don't see a big difference here.”

“I can't believe I listen to some of the stuff you hand me, Blaze,” I said, grinning back at him.

T
he next week was the start of winter break, and I had never been so glad to see it come. Without classes to teach and office hours to squeeze in and Jacoboni to listen to, I could concentrate on my own work…and on Mother…and on Sam.

Seeing that my life was still overloaded even without classes in session was an eye-opener, and I found myself discussing that with the ceiling on a regular basis. Sam called it praying, a point I continued to argue.

“It might be saving my sanity,” I told him, “but that's all I'm willing to concede right now.”

“That's okay,” he said. “We'll wait.”

“You and who else?” I said.

He just gave me his grin and melted me down another ounce.

I did nothing for Christmas except buy a gallon jug of extra-virgin olive oil for Max, a goldfish in a bowl for Mother, and a sweatshirt with the word
Blaze
on it for Sam. He gave me a leather-bound copy of the
Pensées
by Pascal and taught me to pronounce it to rhyme with “Chauncy.”

Hopewell had a bash Christmas Day, complete with several sets of carolers from various churches, a visit from Santa Claus—who turned out to be Ponytail in a very bad fake beard—and a dinner that I had to admit even Max would have eaten. Mother poured gravy over her entire plate and then ate nothing, and she didn't seem to know what to do with the wrapped gift from
Hopewell, which was put in her lap. But she did watch the goldfish I brought her with more attention than I'd seen her give anything else in a while.

“I know it's not your koi pond,” I said to her, “but its as close as I could get. Just promise me you won't pull it out and try to dissect it, okay?”

I went to see her every day, and from all accounts there were no more nighttime house calls to other patients. Frosty—whose name was actually Emily Murphy—said every time they checked on Mother, she was either sleeping, sitting in her chair staring out the window, or watching her goldfish. She advised me not to leave the fish food in her room, lest the poor little thing should bloat up and explode.

Sam and I continued our lively debates, and many of them sprang from what I was reading in
Pensées
.

“Pascal was a freak,” I told Sam on one occasion. “That whole ‘night of fire' thing—do you think that really happened to him?”

“Nobody can know that for sure.”

“I didn't ask if anybody knows. I'm asking if
you
think it did.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah, I think it did.”

“But it's never happened to you.”

“Not that exact experience, no. It's different for everybody. C. S. Lewis said that the day he climbed into the sidecar on his brother's motorcycle, he was still an atheist. When he climbed out at the end of the ride, he was a believer.”

“Must have been some ride.”

“It's definitely a ride, no matter how it happens.” He looked at me, eyes twinkling. “Don't you feel like you're on a ride?”

“Yeah, on a roller coaster, which can stop anytime now, thank you.”

“Nah, you don't want it to stop.”

“The heck I don't!”

“No, you'd miss the best part.”

“And this is about to come.”

“It comes to everybody who seeks God, and you're seeking. It comes in different ways, like I said, but a seeker always eventually feels the joy—and the tears—and it becomes concrete, specific.” He was molding his fingers around an invisible shape. “You will have an experience where what you've been skirting around and questioning and doubting will become
definite
. It'll be a different
experience
of Christ—the living God—but it'll be the same Christ.”

Another night I told him, with disgust, that I had come to the “licking the earth” section in
Pensées
.

“According to Blaze Senior—” I said.

“I'm Blaze Junior now?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Just checking. Go on.”

“According to him, we're supposed to despise ourselves. No, thank you.”

“You didn't read the whole thing. Let me see your copy.”

I looked at him across the table at the Rose and Crown. “I don't carry it around with me.”

“Okay, lemme see if I can remember—”

It was times like that, when his Chicago blue-collar upbringing slipped into his speech, that I loved him the most. He was so very real.

“I think it goes, ‘We are to despise
ourselves
because we have chosen not to fulfill our capacity for good, but we are not to despise our
souls
which
have
that capacity.'”

“You're saying if we listened to our souls instead of ourselves, we'd be better people,” I said.

“Right. Better people who are better able to make good choices.”

“But that's only if there's a difference between our souls and ourselves.”

“Good.”

“Thank you. So which is which?”

“Let's use your mother as an example. We can all see that her ‘self' is virtually gone—the self you knew because that was the self she chose to show.”

“I'm with you so far,” I said.

“But the jury is still out, at least in your mind, on whether she's left with a soul that can still feel and intuit and know things like love and respect.”

“So if there is a soul that goes beyond death and dementia, blah, blah, blah, that's what it is.”

“Right.”

“So it would behoove me to treat her with love and respect, as part of my taking the wager.”

He grinned, but the grin faded as he watched my face.

“What's wrong?” he said.

I pushed my club soda away from me. “I don't think I know
how
to treat her with love and respect. I never did before.”

“Come on, of course you did. I saw you that night I was over at the house. You treated her with the utmost respect.”

“No, that was fear,” I said. “The only two emotions I have ever felt toward my mother are fear and anger. I never showed her disrespect because I was scared to death of her. And then I'd go away completely livid with myself for
being
afraid of her.”

“That's what your
self
felt,” Sam said. “Now you can look at what your
soul
felt. Deep down in there, what did you
want
to feel for your mother?”

I pulled the club soda back to me and stirred it with the straw. “I get the picture. We don't have to pursue this.”

“You're scared.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Then there's some other reason you're slopping your drink all over the table.” He took the straw out of my hand. “It's your soul that's scared. Look at it. It's terrified that you're going to lose your mother completely because you love her.”

“That's where you're wrong,” I said. “I've heard people say, ‘I
love my parents because they're my parents, but I don't like them.' I don't buy that. If I didn't like my mother—which I didn't—how could I possibly love her? She molded me and shaped me into what she wanted me to be. Then when I showed any deviation from her design, she criticized me into wanting to be anything
but
what she wanted me to be. And as a result, I'm just like her. Hey, so I guess old Blaze was right—I do despise myself.”

“And your mother's self.”

“Yeah.”

“But not your soul—and not hers.” Sam put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me closer to him. “So deal with her soul to soul,” he said. “Treat her the way you always wanted to when you were a kid.”

“Sit in her lap?”

“She wouldn't let you do that when you were little?”

“No,” I said. “Not that I can remember.”

He let go of me and watched me closely. “What else?”

“I don't know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You irritating
man!”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's me all over. Come on, spill your guts.”

That was just the point. It
was
like spilling my guts—bringing up the stuff that had been festering and fermenting in me since I was six years old. Bringing it out would be like throwing up, and I hated to throw up. I would rather suffer the stomachache of the century for hours than upchuck once and get it over with. My mother had told me every time I was nauseous that if I would just let it go, I would feel better.

“I wanted her to let me brush her hair,” I said. “She has great hair and all I wanted to do was brush it while we were practicing my French verb conjugations.”

“French verb conjugations?” Sam said. “How old were you?”

“I was about seven when I stopped asking her.”

“And she never let you.”

“No. Nor did she want me ‘hanging all over her in public, licking her ice cream cone—excuse me, frozen yogurt—or giggling when I crawled in bed with her. It wasn't long before she didn't want me crawling in bed with her at all.”

I stopped and looked at Sam.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I don't want a pity party, Blaze. Nor do I want any, ‘Then no wonder you're a cold fish—”'

“Stop it,” he said.

I did, because his voice was sharp.

“You are anything but a cold fish,” he said. “I couldn't love a woman who didn't have a soul that burned into mine.”

“Why, Blaze,” I said, “how poetic of you.”

It came out without the sarcasm, and I was glad.

Tabitha—and the rest of the students—returned to campus a few days after New Year's. She popped into my office the first day of classes to bemoan the fact that she wasn't taking a course from me that quarter.

“That's because I'm not teaching one this quarter,” I said.

“And because I'm not taking any math this quarter.”

“Bad choice,” I said. “You should be taking courses in your major every quarter.”

“Math's not my major anymore.”

Every freckle was shining.

“What about your parents?” I said.

“They're letting me be undeclared until next fall so I can, you know, explore other possibilities.”

If I had had freckles, mine would have been glowing, too.

“I'm impressed,” I said. “How did you swing that?”

“After that talk you and I had, over at your mom's house that one day, I prayed about it a lot and then when I got home I just
sat down with them and I go, ‘I'm not happy in math and I don't think that's where God wants me.' They were, like, still kind of ‘We don't think so,' but then when I told them about what you said—”

“Time out,” I said. “You were quoting me? To your Christian parents?”

“Yeah. Anyway, when I was telling them about you and your mom and how you were still helping me even though you already had so much to deal with, and that you weren't just helping me with math, but with, like, life decisions, that's what got them. They said you were sent by God.”

I steeled myself for the laughter that was sure to come roaring out of my throat and the sarcastic remark that would follow, but all I said was, “Pretty hard to believe.”

“Believe it,” she said. “So I don't have to take any more math, and I'm already happier. The only thing is, I won't see you. I mean, there's no reason for you to tutor me, so…”

She looked so glum, I did laugh. “You totally crack me up, Tabitha,” I said. “First you moan and groan like somebody's torturing you because you
need
tutoring. Now you're pouting because you don't.”

“I'll miss you,” she said.

“I'll be right here. You can stop in.”

“Oh, like I'm gonna stop in when you barely had time to see me before when you had to.”

“Actually,” I said, “I never
had to
. I could have pawned you off on a second- or third-year grad student.”

She did that back-and-forth thing with her head that she always did when she was halfway embarrassed.

“I tell you what,” I said. “I do want you to come over to the house, maybe one night this week. There's somebody I think you should meet. Come for dinner.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah, come tomorrow night. Do you like Italian food?”

“So I'm having this little dinner party,” I told my mother that evening as I sat in her room, brushing her hair while she stared out the window. “Interesting combination of people. You always liked to do that at your dinner parties—put unlikely people next to each other and watch the sparks fly. Anyway, I'm having Max, of course. Like
I'm
going to cook? And Sam—he's the guy I told you about. And Tabitha Lane. You used to eat her chips, remember? I want Max to hear her play the piano. You'd love it. Remember that Rachmaninoff piece I was trying to learn my senior year—that C-minor thing that sounded like aluminum cans going around in the dryer when I played it? She plays it and it's exquisite.”