The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,86
no resentful whatevers, no evasions or lies. No smack of hand on cheek, no nothing, no noise.
But oh, this silence isn’t empty, not at all. The silence is very full.
It was always there, I realize, from the moment Miss Hannah first showed me until now. I’d searched and searched for it, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. It was never so far that, with a little looking, it couldn’t be found.
If only I had searched in the right place.
A low rumble fills the air, a physical sound (again, I don’t know how else to say it), a sound I feel on my skin. It is not a voice. It is not saying anything. Or if it is, the message is merely this: I am here. I am present. Then the rumble grows a throaty, ragged edge and I recognize it as thunder. Through the gap, the sky is molten gray. I sit up and see Holly, her water-freckled skin gleaming in the last light, running toward me with a smile on her lips, her hands held over her head as if to fend off heaven.
“You’re gonna get soaked if you stay down here!”
She snatches up her things and rushes toward the steps. I throw a leg over the side of the lounge chair, forcing myself up. The hiss of rain fills my ears, the drops speckling the ground all around me. I imagine what it would be like to peel off the T-shirt and run into the surf, alone and sylph-like with the storm.
But then I really would be crazy, right? Instead, I follow Holly up the stairs, arriving soaked and laughing as she slides the glass door shut behind me.
“Is this wild or what?” she says. Meaning the two of us, not the storm outside.
“You got wet. I told you so.”
“If our husbands could see us now, huh? They’d pretty much freak out. What am I saying? I’m freaking out. This isn’t my idea of a holiday at the beach.”
“But it’s good,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “I think it is.”
As we stand dripping on the marble tile, towels clutched around our shoulders, I tell Holly that I don’t want to stay.
“I need to get back,” I tell her.
Whatever I was looking for here, I just found it. And there’s something waiting for me at home. I didn’t get a sign under the hut or anything. I didn’t hear a voice. By why should I have to? Why should God have to speak for me to know what he is saying? Couldn’t he also be present in silence?
Just by looking, I was suddenly able to hear, and now I think I know what needs to be done. My father had been wrong—he had to be. It isn’t a zero-sum game. Having a family doesn’t mean I can’t help. There’s something I can do, and I intend to do it.
“Okay,” she says, processing. “But can we at least wait out the storm?”
“There’s no rush,” I say, not believing it at all.
Inside, I know I won’t rest until I’m back.
chapter 16
Home at Last
Holly’s side of the argument, which runs from still-drizzling Jacksonville to the sunny edge of Glen Burnie thirteen hours later, can be summed up in two words: nothing’s changed.
And my answer, equally succinct: I have changed.
It’s not easy to explain. Spiritual awakenings never are. Enlightenments, realizations, burning-bush experiences—none of the ready-made categories seem up to the challenge, particularly when nothing happened to me that didn’t happen to her. I looked at the sky, that’s all. I looked and I had a feeling.
“The trick is to see through the glass, not to be distracted by the image it bounces back at you.” Deedee’s words, and now I begin to understand them.
Whether I’ve changed or not, the facts remain the same. Mission Up is still what it is and Mother Zacchaeus is still really Rosetta Harvey with a criminal record. I’m still a middle-aged white lady from the suburbs who doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into and has no business anyway butting into things she can’t comprehend.
“Eric won’t change his mind, Beth. When it comes to charity, everything has to be aboveboard. People don’t open their wallets these days if they think they’re being scammed.”
“Nobody has to open their wallet. That was my mistake, thinking Eric could fix things, thinking the answer was to turn on the spigot of money. Like the thing that hurts us would help them, like it’s just a question of pointing the hose in the right direction.”