Nain

Inside her head sounded like unbounded waters heaping gasps and shrills upon themselves while she stood next to the coroner’s table where under a white sheet lay mute, motionless her daughter’s body. Her daughter had been found in a motel room by one of the cleaning staff who showed up late for work and quit her job as soon as she told the motel manager about the corpse in room 212. In the coroner’s office the dead woman’s mother heard the detective report the time and cause of death. The time meant that her daughter had been dead a day and a half, alone, before anyone discovered the body. The cause meant that her daughter was using again, which meant her daughter never really stopped. Twenty plus years of following her daughter through the valley of the shadow of death. Now she could follow her no further. Not into those depths. She knew this, just as she knew that her daughter wouldn’t be drawn up right there on the coroner’s table, brought back to her alive.

“The resurrection to come,” the pastor said at the end of his funeral message, “gives every believer of Jesus the hope that one day we’ll see God for eternity. And our loved ones, too.”

“Why not bring my daughter back now,” she thought, as she sat in the church auditorium that had standing room only. “Clothed and in her right mind, while you’re at it, God.”

She also thought to strip her office and her home of every framed Bible verse, positive quote, gospel chorus; each trinket that resembled an angel, a cross, a lamb, a shepherd, a king; delete every Christian song from everyone of her playlists; snap each Southern gospel record, including the Elvis Presley vinyl, Peace in the Valley. She saw herself heaping all those useless things in her backyard, where she could set fire to the waste, turning it all into smoke and ash. See what grows from that. A shoot of Jesse. Her own personal Israel, restored from its scattering. Because she’d been scattered to the cornerless reaches of the void.

Pride kept her together. At least for other people’s eyes. She didn’t want faith since her daughter still died and still stayed an addict for all those years. Had she torched all the Christian stuff, had she looked at each person who shook her hand or hugged her at the viewing, had she taken hold of the pastor’s lectern during the funeral and said, “Who needs God? How many of you have lost children? Terrible marriages. Cancer. Debt. No true friends.” She would have looked in the faces of each person she knew fit those categories. She saw her own face reflected back to her. “Who’s scared of the wars and the wars to come? And what has God done to help us? Really. Would we stay in a house that needed this much repair all the time? Don’t we need, today, miracles like Jesus performed? But where are they? If we have to ask where God is then we’re better off without God.” Had she made that declaration, the shock it would have caused her church and her school would be shame upon her own head. Texts would fly. Emails would be dispatched. Online posts would appear. People would talk and talk and talk. But she didn’t need anyone else to know. She didn’t need a committee or board of trustees or an internet group’s approval. It was God she wanted to reprimand, and she could do that sufficiently all by herself. Sit God down on the other side of her office desk and demand an explanation that she would eviscerate. She’d expel God from her sight. Then she’d only consider letting him return if he apologized to her and gave her daughter back to her.

The new school year began. Another season as administrator. With construction projects at the campus throughout the summer, one of which included expanding the elementary school, which entailed hiring new faculty, the previous school year never ended. Both academic calendars merged into one continuous scroll. The extended and amplified busyness gave her somewhere to be, things she had to do. The movement kept her seemingly a step ahead of the image of her daughter’s lifeless body. She believed her persona masked her distress well enough because she said saccharine things and smiled; and this let her live as if in isolation from everyone else. Some folks considered her to have perfected in the best way a Pharisaical posture. Others waited for her to crack, forget her lines, fall to pieces in a very public way. Yet those with eyes to see and ears to hear perceived through her facade. And those people prayed for her.

Late summer cleared away. Fall made its full residence. Winter wouldn’t be long in arriving. She sat like a stone figure fixed at her desk and stared at a student across from her. The girl, in the administrator’s opinion, continued to ignore her counsel and warnings, especially when it came to making fun of some other students, and this would be the moment it stopped. She would be listened to. She would be obeyed. The girl had no idea it wasn’t her being spoken to but, rather, God, from whom the administrator sought the answer she was due. 

“The audacity of you to do that. How many times do you need to be told, ‘This is a Christian school.’ Don’t act like such a degenerate. It’s like I’m talking to, to — Nothing.” She’d not practiced that word. Every rehearsal ended with, “bully…It’s like I’m talking to a bully.” When “Nothing” rolled out of her mouth she stopped speaking, stunned by what she said, for it was what she believed, and what she believed, now spoken aloud, felt like a great transgression. In her transgression, she unmoored herself from that which was solid, permanent, eternal.

Then the student came slowly undone. A small plume of smoke in a breeze. And the administrator’s entire office did the same, followed by the school, followed by every car in the parking lot and the parking lot itself, the athletic fields, the neighboring homes, the road and highway, heaven and earth. All that remained was the chair she sat on and she herself, suspended above what sounded like deep, troubled waters breaking open with wild animals yapping, bellowing, swarping, from anguish and anger, wanting reprieve while fighting off any helping hand.

Could she command the waters? None of her words rescued her daughter? And would she, like her daughter, let all the words spoken to her go unheeded?

The Nothing she thought surrounded her and enveloped her and seeped into her chest melted away to a throne that sat above the mercurial waters, and on that throne resided Holiness, whose presence blinded her and gave her sight, weighed her down yet made her know her sins, and made her feel peace as though it were within reach. She wanted to grasp it. She wanted to fall down before it. She wanted it to hold her. Though this wasn’t what she deserved. 

Holiness spoke and all was reformed as it had been; the earth and the heavens, the highways and road, the homes around the school, the athletic fields, the parking lot, the cars and pick-up trucks, the school buildings, her office and desk, and the student sitting at her desk across from her.

She apologized to the student and dismissed her back to class.

Alone in her office, after slipping to the floor, she wept, and in her weeping she begged God for mercy and received it.   

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