Seasons Under Heaven (2 page)

It wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she’d become a mother.

If only they were older. If only they could entertain themselves and tie their own shoes and fix their own sandwiches and clean up their own messes. If only she had two hours a day—even one hour would do—of uninterrupted time to pursue her own dreams, without someone undoing it all with the flick of a Kool-Aid-stained finger.

She sat there crying for a long time, until finally she knew that she had to feed her kids lunch or surrender the bag of gummy bears—resulting in a sugar high that would be sure to make the afternoon as challenging as the morning.

Sywia teetered atop the ladder in her living room and carefully removed the white bow from its place near the ceiling. She’d hung bows all around the room, one every three feet, and draped lace between them. Even from this height, she could still smell the sweet fragrance of the white roses and orchids that sat in huge pots around the room. It had made for a beautiful wedding reception for her daughter. But the biggest hit of the party hadn’t been the lace and ribbons and roses but rather Sarah’s childhood pictures that Sylvia had blown up, placed in gold gilded frames, and hung in an arrangement on one wall of her living room. Jeff, her son, was in many of the pictures as well. Across the room was a similar display of photographs Sylvia had gotten from the groom’s mother. She had finished taking that display down earlier this morning, but it was more difficult removing the ones of her own children.

Not for the first time that morning, reality hit her, and the vast emptiness of the house after all the madness of the past few weeks caught up with her. The silence seemed to scream mocking cruelties into her ear about her empty nest and her outlived usefulness. Tears came to her eyes, and she sat down on one of the ladder rungs and tried to get hold of herself.

Longingly, her gaze swept over the photograph of Sarah as a little girl, her brother Jeff hovering over her. Had it been in second or third grade that Sarah had played the Statue of Liberty in the school play? That picture had caused a lot of laughter among their family and friends. The costume party—had that been for Jeff’s sixth or seventh birthday? Had Jeff gone to college yet when they’d taken the youth group to the Alpine Sled in Chattanooga? Half of those kids had come to the wedding, and the stories they’d told…

“Are you taking those down?”

She jumped at the sound of her husband’s voice, making the ladder teeter. Harry rushed forward and steadied it. “Harry! I didn’t hear you come in.” Her voice was cracked and choked with emotion, and when he looked up at her, she knew he saw the tears. Quickly, she wiped them away.

“This is dangerous, Sylvia,” he said gently, indicating the ladder. “You shouldn’t do this unless I’m home. Wait till later and I’ll help you.”

She sighed and came down. “I wanted to get it done. The sooner the better.”

“Why don’t you rest? The wedding took a lot out of you. You deserve to do nothing today. You remember how, don’t you? Think way back to before we had kids.”

“I can’t remember that far back,” she whispered, looking up at those pictures again.

He gave her a tender look, then moved behind her and set his hands on her shoulders. Kissing her hair, he said, “You know, you don’t have to take them down at all.”

“They’re not right there,” she said. “I’ll spread them out around the house. I’ll have to patch the holes in the wall, you
know, and repaint. There’s so much to do.” Again, those tears came, constricting her throat.

Harry turned her around and made her look up at him. Though his hair was more gray than black, his face had retained its youthful look, and his eyes still twinkled with mischief. The very sight and feel of him reminded her that she was not completely alone today, that her life’s companion was still here, and that he would not forsake her. “Your children haven’t fired you, you know,” he said. “You’re still their mother.”

“I don’t know how to be a long-distance mother,” she said. “Why did we let them move to other states? They’re both so far away. Before we know it, they’ll have kids of their own, and we’ll be long-distance grandparents who see them once or twice a year. The grandkids will have to be reminded who we are.”

“Fat chance,” Harry said. “Honey, when Sarah gets back from her honeymoon, she’ll be calling you every day to find out how to make meat loaf and pumpkin pie, and to cry when she’s homesick or mad at Larry, or just to talk because she misses you. Mark my word. You might just be the one who’s not available.”

Sylvia wiped her face again. “What do you mean?”

He started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. “Listen, I had a cancellation for my first patient after lunch, so that’s why I came home. I was hoping to take you to lunch somewhere nice. When’s the last time we went out? I thought maybe that little South American restaurant over on Hilliard Street. We could talk—”

“Harry, I don’t want to go out. Look at me. I’m a mess. Could I take a rain check?”

“A mess? You’re beautiful. Slim and young-looking. I heard at least three people at the wedding asking if you were Sarah’s sister.”

She couldn’t help being amused. “Don’t lie.”

“Well, okay, just one. But it happened. Scout’s honor.”

“I’m fifty years old and I feel sixty-five. Forced into mandatory retirement. Totally obsolete.”

Harry’s grin faded and he frowned down at her. “You really are depressed, aren’t you?”

“And you aren’t?”

He slid his hands into his pockets and looked down at his feet. He was thinking, trying to answer honestly, she knew. Harry wasn’t one to just tell her what she wanted to hear.

“The other night,” he said seriously, “after Sarah and Larry drove off, and the guests started going home, I went in the bathroom and cried. It was tough. My baby, Daddy’s little girl, riding off into the sunset with some guy who’s going to take care of her for the rest of her life.” His eyes misted up even now as he recalled those emotions.

Sylvia smiled softly. “I should have known. And there I was flitting around, laughing and smiling for the guests, ignoring you completely.”

“I wanted to be ignored when I felt like that,” he said. “But it passed. This morning, I started thinking differently. I started thinking of this time of our lives as a beginning instead of an ending. We can do whatever we want now. All these years, when we’ve wanted to do things, but couldn’t because we had the kids to think of—well, now we can go anywhere, do anything, and it’s just the two of us. No more excuses. No more reasons to stay in the same old place. I started getting excited, Sylvia.”

Sylvia looked up at him, frowning, wondering where he was going with this. “So where is it you want to go? What is it you want to do?”

Again, he looked down at his feet, searching for honest words, and she realized this midday homecoming wasn’t just a whim. He had something specific to say. She tried to brace herself. “Harry?”

“You sure you don’t want to go eat?” he asked her. “Even just a burger? We could eat in the car, even.”

She sighed. “This must be really big if you have to say it over food.”

“I’m just hungry. It’s really nothing. In fact, we can talk about it another time.”

“Let me run a brush through my hair, and we can go,” she said.

Harry grinned, and she knew it was what he’d really wanted. She went into the bathroom, brushed her just-permed hair, and applied some lipstick so she wouldn’t look so pale. She powdered the redness over her nose and decided her eyes were hopeless. It was just as well that Harry wanted to go out, she decided. She did need a diversion today.

She followed him out to the Explorer and waited while he unlocked it for her. She looked around at the little houses on the cul-de-sac where they’d lived for so long. Near the neck of the little circle, she saw three of Brenda’s kids helping their dad drag picnic tables into the empty lot between their house and the Sullivans. Today was Joseph’s birthday, she remembered. They had invited her to the party, but she’d almost forgotten.

She remembered when her own were little, before the culde-sac called Cedar Circle had been developed around them. Their own house had been built on a huge, twenty-acre plot at the top of Survey Mountain. It had been much smaller then, until Harry’s surgical practice had gotten off the ground. Almost yearly, they had added something to their house.

When she and Harry had made the decision to sell some of the land to a builder to develop into a cul-de-sac, they had done it for the kids. The children needed playmates, she’d told Harry, and he agreed. The developer had plotted out Cedar Circle, paved the streets, and three houses had gone up with wisteria and jasmine-covered picket fences, oaks, and elm trees. None of the homes was quite as large as the Bryans’, and none had the stretch of land in the back that the Bryans had kept for their horses. But the neighbors had become close friends, and their children had always had playmates.

But all those children had grown up, and their families, one by one, had moved away. Now the cul-de-sac was populated with younger mothers with active children who only reminded her how she longed for the former days.

“Are you planning to get in, or just stand here all day gazing down Memory Lane?” Harry teased.

She looked up at him. “Sorry. I was just remembering the way it looked before those houses…” She got in, and he closed the door behind her, then slipped in on the other side. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said. “It’s one of those days when you can’t seem to keep your thoughts going in the right direction. It’s the classic, textbook case of empty-nest syndrome. I read all about it when they went off to college. But they were close by, and I knew they’d be back for meals and laundry…”

“Yeah, this is different. This time they’re really gone.”

“I need a hobby,” she said. “A project. Maybe that would get my mind off of it.”

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out a little too long, and hooking her attention. “Maybe I have the answer. I’ll tell you while we eat.”

A few minutes later he pulled into a Burger King, and they both went in and ordered food that was a cardiac surgeon’s nightmare. When they’d found a table in the corner, Sylvia brought the subject up again. “Okay, Harry. Shoot. What’s your project?”

He gazed out the window. “I’m torn. I don’t know whether I should tell you while you’re depressed because it might make you more depressed, or whether it’ll be just the thing you need to shake you out of it.”

“Well, you’ll never know until you try.” She took a bite of her hamburger.

“You know how we’ve always said that someday when the kids are grown, we’d go to the mission field?”

“Sure. Do you want to take some extra medical mission trips to Nicaragua this year?”

“No, not mission trips. Longer term.”

She set her hamburger down and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, keeping her eyes fixed on him. “You can’t be serious.”

He looked like a schoolboy trying to convince his mother to buy him a sports car. “Haven’t we always said that, Sylvia? Even these last few years, every time we went on those little trips, we’ve talked about how great it would be if we were unencumbered
and could just go and take the miracles of modern medicine to those people who can’t afford it?”

She couldn’t deny that they’d talked about it many times. She had agreed that it would be wonderful to be an ambassador of grace, to make sacrifices, to give of herself to people who needed what she could bring them. But what was that, exactly? Harry could take them medicine—she was mostly just there for support.

“It’s a great ministry, Sylvia. I’ve felt called to do it most of my life, but I also felt responsible to give the kids a normal life. But now the kids are gone, and it’s time for me to stop making excuses.”

She looked in his eyes and saw the joy building there like a cresting tide. The emotions in her own heart felt like those same waves crashing against a bleak and rocky shore.

“Sylvia, just think about how much good we could do there.”

“
You
could do so much good there,” she said, that tightness returning to her voice. “But what could
I
do?”

“What could
you
do? You’re the Doña. The one they all respected.”

“I’d be useless there, Harry. Even in our own home, I wouldn’t have a purpose. Every home there has a maidservant to clean. What would I do all day?”

“You could start a ministry with the mothers and children, Sylvia. Teach parenting skills, Bible studies, evangelism. You’d be such an example to them. A mother figure for them to look up to.”

Tears erupted in her eyes again, and she shook her head. “I’m not prepared to be a mother to anybody but my own kids, Harry, and they’re gone.”

“They’re not gone. You talk like they’re dead. They’re still alive, honey, they’re just proving that we succeeded. They’re happy and healthy and building lives of their own.”

She shook her head and looked down at the burger. She couldn’t eat another bite. Her stomach wouldn’t accept it. “I’m not ready, Harry,” she said through tight lips. “Not yet. Maybe
next year, or the year after that. The kids still might need me, and I can’t be out of the country.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “Honey, the kids will always need you. But God may want us somewhere else.”

She couldn’t believe this was so important to him. Had he been biding his time, chomping at the bit throughout the whole wedding process, counting the days until Sarah was gone, so he could fly off to Managua?

“Are…are you finished? Eating, I mean?”

He looked down at the half-eaten burger. “Yeah, I guess. Honey, this is upsetting you. I’m sorry. I should have waited until a better time, but I thought it might cheer you up. You said you wanted a project.”

“Can we go home?” She was making a valiant effort to fight the tears, but she was losing.

“Sure.”

She slid out of the booth and threw their wrappers away, then headed through the door. The drive home was quiet.

When they pulled back into the driveway, she got out and dashed inside.

Harry was behind her in an instant. “Honey, listen,” he said, wrapping his arms around her, “I can see how upset this has made you. The timing is all wrong. Just forget I ever said anything.”

But that wouldn’t be right either, she knew. Harry rarely asked for anything for himself. For years, he’d been catering to his family’s wants and needs. This once, he had some of his own. But they were just too hard for her to accept.

She looked around her. Over the years, she’d decorated their home exactly as she’d wanted it. It was a showplace—and it bore the sentimental, beloved scars of a family that had grown up here. The growth chart on the pantry wall, the mural they’d painted in Sarah’s room, the little stained glass windows the kids had made one summer.