The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,11
shuts it, closes her eyes in intense pain. I take her by the shoulders, not knowing what else to do.
She lets out a long breath, then lowers her hands. “It’s okay.”
“Are you all right?”
“It’s stupid,” she says. “Have you ever heard of tinnitus?”
“Of course. It’s, like, ringing in your ears?”
“No, it’s more like hearing feedback from a speaker. It’s this high-pitched electronic whine. It started a couple of months ago. At first I thought my hearing was going bad, but according to the tests, it’s all in my head. Stress-induced. I told my doctor, I’ve never been less stressed out than I am now, but . . . I don’t know. I guess this is what it’s like to get old.”
“We’re not old.”
“Speak for yourself. I looked in the mirror this morning and, Beth, I have jowls. Look at this . . .” She runs her hand up and down the line of her chin. “These are my mother’s, not mine.”
I remember my own glimpse in the mirror this afternoon, my truer, younger self staring back at me.
“Do you take medicine for tinnitus?”
“Usually it’s a symptom of some kind of hearing loss. I thought maybe I’d gone to too many concerts as a wild child. But no, what the doctor prescribed was behavioral cognitive therapy, which is a fancy way of saying I go to a shrink. Does it help? Not so far.”
“Do you always hear it?”
“The funny thing is, you learn to tune it out. It’s there but somehow you push it into the background. Then your brain starts messing with the volume knob. All night long, it’s been going crazy.”
“Maybe it’s the stress of coming here.”
She smiles. “You want to hear something funny? As much as it hurts, I don’t feel like something’s wrong with me. What it feels like is a part of my brain switched on and now I can hear things that people aren’t supposed to hear. You know how dogs can hear frequencies that humans can’t? In this analogy, I’m the dog. I never catch myself thinking, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ The question I ask is, ‘How can they not hear it?’ Isn’t that strange?”
“Well,” I say, “believe it or not, it isn’t the strangest thing I’ve heard today.”
Kathie smiles again and reaches for my hand. She tells me she’s missed me and that we’re going to stay in touch from now on, and how happy she is to have gotten to talk. But as she’s saying this, I can see her eyelid fluttering slightly and her lip pulling taut. She can hear it now, I realize, that secret frequency all her own. I can’t imagine what that must be like.
Rick and I stand on the front porch waving until the Maserati is out of sight. Once the men came in from the shed, Jim took Jed for the promised spin, then it was time to call it a night. As he turns to go inside, I loop my arm inside Rick’s.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “What was Jim talking to you about?”
“Haven’t you guessed?”
He goes around the house turning off the lights. I turn a few back on for when Eli comes home. Rick heads upstairs, beckoning me to follow, and behind the closed bedroom door, he peels his shirt off and pulls me against him. I can’t remember the last time we held each other, the last time we kissed. His lips are cold.
“It was a job, wasn’t it?” I ask.
He backs us toward the bed, plopping down and pulling me after him. He pulls on my top, but I close my hand over his.
“Tell me.”
He sighs contentedly. “Their church in Virginia. The lead pastor retired and now Jim’s on the search committee. He’s the chairman, in fact. He says they trust him to find the right guy.”
“And you’re Jim’s guy?”
“I am Jim’s guy.” He kicks his shoes off, then his socks. “My talents are wasted here, he says. You know what I think about that. I feel like I don’t even have a voice here anymore, and Jim says I should. I should have a big voice in the Church—the capital C church, not just ours. The church in Virginia isn’t as big as ours, but I’d be the lead pastor.”
“Okay . . .”
“‘You’d be trading a megachurch for a megaphone,’ that’s how he put it. I’ve been ‘hiding my light under a bushel,’ a lot of stuff like that. He really wants me to do it, Beth.”