Dogwood (7 page)

I was staring at the clock in the visitors’ room, watching the second hand glide along, but I was somewhere else. Funny how prison can confine you but can’t make you live there. I’ve read
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
fifteen times if I’ve read it once, and each time I cry. Not for myself or Andy Dufresne but for the lack of dreams in here. People live day to day, counting time until it’s the only thing to count. Most people outside these walls live the same way. They wait for something to happen, something that tips them over the edge so they can start living. “When I finish school . . .” “When I get a new job . . .” “When I get a little more money . . .” The goals are endless. School. Marriage. Children. You can wait your entire life for something and when it finally comes forget why you wanted it.

It took time to adjust, but once I saw the possibilities and embraced Clarkston, I tried not just to exist but to
thrive
. Some saw it in me. Others resented the life in my eyes. The guards called me Will instead of by my last name like the other inmates.

A black guard with a thick African accent once said to me, “You seem freer in here than half the people I know out there.”

Now the air felt stagnant and hot. Spring was on us and the
sun baked the room. It would be several weeks before the warden relented and turned the air-conditioning on in the newer part of the jail, and the men would complain and sweat and thrash against the unwritten rule that it wasn’t turned on until mid-June.

Some men count the days until their release. I don’t waste my time crossing squares off a calendar. I have an internal sense that things are changing. Soon I’ll have paid my debt, and other than my mother, there’s only one person I know I have to see.

You’re going to be a great mom to your children when that time comes,
I had written Karin in the first week.
Whoever marries you is going to be the most fortunate man on the face of the earth, and I can only hope that you’ll wait for me. I’ll understand if you don’t feel the same way. I release you from any promise you’ve made, any unspoken desire, anything said in haste or in an unguarded moment. It sounds trite, but I will truly be happy if you find happiness. If you decide to wait for me, my joy will be doubled. If not, I’ll still pray your husband treats you with gentleness and respect and will always realize that you are a treasure.

My face burned when I thought of her reading those words. I wanted to crumple the paper and write something else, something about her counting the days until I was free. But that wouldn’t be fair to either of us, and I knew, like with the farm kittens I held as a child, the more you cling to an animal, the more it wants its freedom. I have claw marks in my memory to prove that.

So I released her. Not as a calculated plot or ploy, not because it was the only way to get her to return, but because it was my true heart’s desire that she be happy, fulfilled, and loved.

I reached an understanding there on that bed, listening to the sounds of men in the night. Like a burning campfire, I was either in or out. I would be either her passionate lover or nothing. I could not settle for some platonic friendship that danced at the edge of the truth. If I had to love her from a distance, I would. But if she allowed me in, I would love her wholly, with every fiber.

I clung to a dream—a vision of Karin, wind flying through her hair, her pale, freckled face upturned to the moonlight. Deep in the still West Virginia night, with the crickets chirping and fireflies rising from the earth, beacons to a new season of life, one night came back to me when we had been close.

She had unlocked a door and defenses had fallen. Maybe because she was so vulnerable and fragile? Whatever the reason, I held on to it as if it were life itself. Her laughter, her voice singing along with the radio, songs I would always associate with her, the hum of tires, the rush of wind, a touch. Lips pressing. Eyes closed. The soft hint of wine on her breath. The smallness of her back and shoulders—I had never known anything could feel so delicate, so alive.

My dream, my vision, ended there. I never received a reply to the letters. They dropped into a void, a bottomless pit, and never returned. Writing those letters was my first act of release, the first of many, ridding myself of the feelings and passion. It was my first act of love toward her. I hoped it would not be my last.

Palms sweating, I walked behind Ruthie through the metal detector. She had to put her cane through the machine and hold on to the sides. The machine beeped, and the guard made her go through again. When the alarm didn’t stop, he used the wand and centered on a spot at Ruthie’s side near her waist.

“You have anything under your dress, ma’am?” the guard said.

Ruthie had an attitude, and I was concerned she might say something we’d both regret.

She gave me a playful look, which was not a good sign. She looked straight at the guard and said, “I had my hip replaced a few years ago, young man. My doctor said there’s a good chance it would drive security people crazy if I ever started traveling. Guess he didn’t take prison into account.”

“I’m going to need to frisk you, ma’am, just to be sure.” The guard said it apologetically, like it was something he really didn’t want to do.

Ruthie held up her arms, and soon we were both through.

“Do you need a wheelchair, ma’am?” the guard said.

“I’ll let my feet do the walking, thank you,” Ruthie said, but
when we were at the other end of the hall, she looked like she wished she would have said yes.

Another guard led us to the visitors’ room, but Ruthie couldn’t keep up with him. Finally the guard just pointed. “Take a seat inside there. Your party will be on the other side of the glass.”

“Is he there?” Ruthie said.

“Waiting on you, ma’am.”

I took Ruthie’s free arm and walked with her. Having her close gave me comfort, and I wasn’t sure who was steadying whom as we walked.

We were halfway there when Ruthie spoke. “Been thinking it might be time you know my interpretation. Of the dream. You and the baby and your parents.”

“Here? Now?”

“Good a time as any, don’t you think?”

No, I don’t think so. I’m about to see someone I haven’t seen in more than a decade who changed the life of our town forever, who took my heart, my very life with him as he walked into this prison, and you pick now to . . .

“I guess so,” I said.

Ruthie stopped and looked at her watch. It was a minute before eleven according to the gray clocks in the hall above us, but Ruthie ran on her own time.

“There’s a reason your mother isn’t in the dream,” she began. “You and your mother are close; it would cloud things. But your father is more aloof in your life, so the fact that he’s there for you and inviting makes it easier to see.”

“Easier? What part of this is easy?”

“Have you ever seen the baby’s face?”

I thought for a moment. “No. I can hear it. It coos and giggles and makes baby noises, but it’s covered with a blanket when I’m holding it, and when it’s on the floor, I never see its face.”

She nodded. “It’s not your child. Not one of your children or one of your future children.”

“How do you know?”

Ruthie skirted the question. “It’s just a theory, mind you, so I’m not saying—”

“Would you just tell me?”

She sighed. “What if the baby is you? Or better yet, what if this child represents your soul?”

I stopped breathing, dead in my shoes. The hallway spun with some realization. But what?

“Your father is intensely interested in your soul, even though you don’t seem to be. You wrap it up and hold it tightly, not because you want to nurture it but because you don’t want to see its reality. That it really is there.”

“Soul, as in my spiritual side,” I said, gasping the words.

“Soul, as in your being. What’s at Karin’s core. It’s clear you don’t care much about it, at least in the dream. If it weren’t your father, if it were some babysitter or drug dealer, you’d hand it over. You think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice catching. “What about my father? Who is he?”

“I think you know.”

I struggled to swallow and choked out, “God?”

Ruthie nodded. “He cares a lot for that soul of yours. More than you know. More than you ever will or could. He’s the one who made it in the first place. Makes sense he’d want to care for it, nourish it, cherish it. And he’s willing to wait until you’re ready, until you can bring everything to him. In the meantime, whether you realize it or not, he’s there, acting like yours is the only one in the world.”

My knees felt weaker than hers looked. “Why now? Why
here
? Why did you wait until—?”

“Timing is everything, my dear. It’s no coincidence I waited
till now because I didn’t think you were ready before. I knew you weren’t. That you came with me to this place, that you’re willing to see this scoundrel or devil or lover is proof you’re willing to open up a little and take a chance.”

I recoiled from the thought. “Take a chance on what? On throwing my marriage away? my children? my life? I don’t even know what I’m doing here. What
we’re
doing here.”

Someone stepped up behind us. A guard. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” I said. “Just a discussion before we go inside.”

“Better hurry it up.” He pointed at the clock. “Time’s wastin’.”

“Ruthie, this whole thing scares me. What if I get in there and . . . ?”

She patted my arm with an arthritic hand that could have passed as the talon of some ancient bird. “Karin, do you trust me?”

“I have up until now, but I’m beginning to wonder why.”

“Then you’re going to have to trust me when you don’t feel like it.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“I do.” Ruthie said it forcefully, eyebrows furrowed, like she meant for it to sink deep into my soul. “I’ve divined the one dream you told me about, but I haven’t figured out the other one.”

That took my breath. “How do you know about the other one? I never told you.”

She waved a hand. “Some dreams are written on our minds, and it takes years to figure them out. Others are written on our hearts, and it takes someone who loves us deeply to read them and tell us what they mean. There is a language on your heart I’ve been trying to translate ever since I met you. At first, it was just curiosity. Then the more I got to know you, the more I came to love you, the more I wanted to know.” She pointed at the door. “There’s an answer sitting in a chair in that room, separated from us by a thick wall of plastic. I am going to find out what is written
on that heart of yours because it’s the only thing that will truly set you free. At least that’s what I believe.”

My heart would not be still. Something told me life would never be the same once we faced Will.

“Karin, I know this is good, but there’s something I need you to do.”

I wasn’t sure what else she could ask. She had already driven me from my comfortable life. What more?

“Can you open that door for me?” she said.

Children are unaware of thorns.

I pushed Tarin’s stroller to Ruthie’s house, and Tarin caught sight of a rosebush in bloom and reached to grab it. I held her hand but picked a bud so she could smell it. “That’ll hurt you if you touch the sticky parts,” I said.

Ruthie’s house was nestled in a sea of stucco and hot tubs, and its simplicity struck me. Ivy wandered around the chimney, and violets bloomed near the concrete porch. Inside was unbearably hot, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had bathed before dinner and smelled of sweet talcum.

Ruthie poured two glasses of sparkling wine, and we ate a mouthwatering Parmesan chicken recipe she said had been in her family a hundred years. I think it was the first time I truly savored a meal.

“Food was never meant to be gulped,” Ruthie would later say. “Food and family and friends are meant to be enjoyed
slowly
. Meals are a lot like life, fresh and hot and inviting. If you run through them, you miss a lot.”

At some point in the evening, Ruthie asked about my love life.

“I’m married. I don’t have time for love.”

I thought she would laugh, but she waited, drawing me like some ingrown tide. Though I could not speak his name, I told her of a young man I had known, and the feelings I had pushed away suddenly returned.

“What happened to him?” she said.

“He went away and I settled for a good man.”

“Have you ever spoken with him?”

I shook my head. “It’s too late.”

Somehow we got onto the topic of writing, something I had done in childhood. Ruthie handed me a leather-bound notebook and said she wanted me to fill it with everything I could remember.

That night I began writing again, but I mostly filled the book with her words, her homespun wisdom. When I met her for lunch and forgot the notebook, I wrote on paper napkins or on the backs of children’s menus. I could not get enough of her words, and there didn’t seem to be anything she would hold back from me.

Some time later she asked what I’d written, and I opened the book to her words and shared my thoughts.

Ruthie laughed from the gut, put her elbow on the table, and propped her chin on the back of her hand. “I think we’ve finally found something.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Finally hit a nerve. All this time we’ve been dancing around the edges of your life, and we finally find it in this journal of yours.”

“You mean, writing? You think—”

“It’s never only one thing, honey. It’s not just writing or the idea of putting something on paper for others to read. There’s something more here.”

The wrinkles on her face came into focus as she leaned forward. “You struggle. You fight and you claw inside that head of yours. You wrestle with God, with the idea that he actually cares for you, with the place your children have brought you, and a
thousand other things. There’s something about your struggle others need to know. That they’ll benefit from.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ruthie stood and picked up one of the glass objects her husband had created. A dogwood bloom. Two long petals, two short, like the cross. A bloodstain on each. At the center, a crown of thorns. Our town had embraced the story of Christ crucified on a dogwood tree. The legend said it once grew straight and tall. Jesus promised it would never be used for executions again, and as the poem went, “Slender and twisted it shall always be, with cross-shaped blossoms for all to see.”

Ruthie cradled the glass gingerly, studying it and holding it up to the light like a priceless gem. “God puts every one of us here for a purpose. There’s some pull on our lives that draws us toward that purpose, and the farther we go away from it, the more unhappy we are. The closer we get, the more we yearn and desire it.”

“I’m a mother and a wife. I don’t have time for purpose or desire or being drawn to anything but sleep and laundry.”

She smiled. “There’s a reason you spend nights in your closet. I think you’re there because you’re not even close.”

“Close to what?”

“To what you were really put here to be. Not to do. To
be
.
Doing
is overrated.
Being
is where God works. What he’s most concerned about.”

I frowned. “What, you want me to start an orphanage? run for office?”

“Nobody knows that but you and God. And you don’t even know the half of it. You see, he looks at our lives as a whole, not just today, tomorrow, yesterday, and next week. Not even this year and next. He’s not counting your failures and your mistakes and keeping a running tab like heaven’s waiter. He sees the end just as well as the beginning. He knows about the pit you’re in right now.”

“The closet.”

“Exactly. He knows where you’re headed. You’ll get there if you keep struggling. Most people think the struggle means failure. It’s actually the best thing that could happen. That struggle will pull you out on the other side a lot stronger, a lot deeper. It’s like cooking a good meal. You don’t do that in a microwave, my dear. You let it simmer and boil and simmer some more until it’s right. And you do that in an oven over lots of time and some high temperatures. Life is a process without a timer.”

It was a stretch to believe my nights in the closet weren’t worthless siftings of the mind. “So you think I’m supposed to write?”

Ruthie rolled her eyes. “It’s not a
supposed
to. And, yes, you will find whatever that thing is.”

“But how do you know?” I said. “What was
your
purpose?”

Her eyes twinkled like I imagined Santa’s would the night before Christmas. “When I was little, times were hard. I grew up along a creek, and I’d spend hours walking up and down it, surveying the flow of the water, just like you used to do. One day I was looking into the water and saw the reflection of a young girl across from me. From that day on, I knew I had a friend. We spent hours together. Talking. Laughing. Having tea parties. Every time we were together, it was like pouring water from an endless pitcher. Her life into mine, mine into hers. Over the years, I’ve replaced her with others, usually younger women.”

“Like me.”

Ruthie nodded. “Water that’s not moving becomes stagnant. And if there’s not someone pouring into you, the pitcher gets dusty. A person is most satisfied and most useful when she is both giving and receiving. In marriage. In life. In friendship. With God too.”

A few days later Ruthie and I talked as I pushed Tarin in a stroller along the sidewalk. There were moments talking with Ruthie
when things became crystal clear, as if my life’s clouds suddenly broke and brilliant sunshine streamed through, illuminating the countryside.

“I went to the kitchen the other night for a glass of water and grabbed a mug from the cabinet,” I said. “It was dark and I felt my way along until I found the sink and turned on the tap. But I had the mug upside down. I didn’t know it, but I was trying to put water in an upside-down mug.”

“What happened?”

“Water went everywhere. My nightshirt got soaked. It just struck me: I’ve lived my whole life like that—upside down. God has tried pouring things into me that I had no capacity to keep.”

She smiled and wobbled to a stop. “Karin, here’s the hidden truth about that. He’s the one turning your life upside down. He has you in that closet for a purpose.”

“But I don’t like it. It’s not fair.”

Ruthie put a wrinkled, arthritic arm around me. “One day you’ll be right side up, and the water will go where it’s supposed to. You’ll be filled.” She spread a hand out and motioned toward an imaginary window. “One day there will be a display at Books-A-Million. It’ll fill a whole window and they’ll have to stack them on top of each other and people will push their way through to get at them. Oprah will call and you’ll be too busy to talk.”

“Right. And what will my books be about? What’s the subject that will draw me again and again?”

“It’ll be about struggle and finding your heart. It’s really what you’re all about.”

“What do you mean?”

Ruthie didn’t speak for a long time. When we made it to her porch, I took Tarin out and let her play with a shoe box filled with toys Ruthie kept out for her.

Finally she spoke. “We do almost anything not to struggle. We take the easy path because it makes us feel better. We think a
smooth road will get us to the destination quicker. And that’s our problem—we’re not at all concerned about
where
we’re going but
how fast
we can get there.” She sat in a rocking chair and wiped her brow with a paper towel. “That has been your full-time job for a long time.”

“Taking the easy way out?”

“Choosing to feel better instead of growing.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I decided to follow her lead. “Why do you think I do that?”

“Because growing is painful. Most people work overtime at the Make Me Feel Better Chapel. Something bad happens and they throw a verse at you, like a fish to a walrus. That makes
them
feel better, being able to pull something out of a hat they hope will make sense of the pain. But if you’re on the other end, it doesn’t matter that the verse is true; it still feels like a fish because the person had no intention of entering your struggle. Of just sitting with you and moving through it like those Old Testament boys did or the man in the parable. It never occurs to them that you need them to bend down and help you up, take you to a doctor, try to bandage your wounds. They throw a verse, cross to the other side, and they’re on their way.”

“But I don’t blame them. Struggling is hard. You can’t really enter into another person’s pain like that.”

Ruthie drained her glass of iced tea and tossed the remaining ice cubes onto her zinnias. She took my glass, turned hers over, and poured a small amount of tea on the bottom and watched it pool. “You were telling me about living upside down and trying to pour water on the bottom of a mug. It’s possible to hold a little water here. That’s the way I tell if my dishes are clean in the dishwasher. Most times I can’t remember if I’ve done them, so I pat my hand there to see if there’s any water. You can’t get much, but there’s some.”

Then she turned her glass over, grabbed the pitcher of tea,
and poured with abandon until the glass overflowed, ran down the sides onto her hand, and spilled onto the porch.

I picked up my feet as it gushed past Tarin, who looked on in amazement.

Ruthie’s eyes were on me, burning through. “Which do you want?” she whispered. “Do you want to live on the surface of the bottom, as shallow as the bottom of this glass? Or do you want something else?”

“I want to be filled. I want to overflow.”

Tears rimmed her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Good. You struggle and fight with everything in you and don’t take the easy way out. Wrestle those demons in that closet and don’t stop struggling until you’ve written it down for every one of us.”

It took a long time to digest that.

Later, when a cool breeze had blown past us, carrying the scent of dinners on the wind, Ruthie spoke again. “Most people have given up on their heart. They’ve settled for less. Like a married couple on treadmills, both working hard, spewing out sweat, but never getting anywhere. They’re content to sit on the porch in rocking chairs and watch life. At one point they had some vague sense when something deep down inside called to them and they wanted to follow, but the ticking clock and the kids and the mortgage drowned it out. It’s a rhythm, a beat in the background you have to strain to hear. You have to push things out of the way to really listen.”

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” I said reluctantly.

“You hear it clearly when you’re young. There’s a freedom when you’re a child that sets the heart on the right path. But something happens. Especially with girls. We sense something. We feel uneasy in our gut because of someone’s words or an action, something that doesn’t feel quite right, but then we push it down. We don’t listen.”

“Why?”

“For a million reasons. We don’t want people to think we’re judgmental. We don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings. We’re afraid of what others might think.”

“Example,” I said.