The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 20


All Saints





You brought me all the way up here to say no?”

Even if I couldn’t hear the disbelief in his voice, the expression alone would tell me Jim Shaw is angry. He sits on the edge of the sofa, Kathie by his side, wringing his fingers together with so much force it wouldn’t surprise me if they started popping off.

“I brought you up here,” Rick says, “to show you why I’m saying no.”

It’s a strange thing, seeing Jim at a social loss. Usually he’s so quick to patch over the cracks, to smooth the rough spots. But Rick has blindsided him, and it shows.

“Fine,” he says. “Show me.”

“In the morning, Jim. Come to church with us, then afterward I’m gonna take you somewhere. I want you to see this for yourself.”

But Jim is already shaking his head. “I’ll be honest with you, sport. I’m not going back there. Nothing against you, but when we left The Community, we had our reasons. I wouldn’t have given you an opportunity to leave the place if I didn’t think there were problems.”

“I’m not asking you to go back there.”

“‘Come to church,’ you said.”

“That’s right. But The Community is not the only church in town.”

“It’s the only one you work for.”

“Not anymore,” Rick says.

The room falls silent.

Ordinarily I would have jumped in by now, trying to defuse the situation. But the news Rick broke to Jim just now, he didn’t share with me until right before the Shaws arrived. I’m still trying to fathom what’s going on. When he told me he was leaving The Community, chucking the Men’s Pastor job, I assumed that meant yes to Virginia, yes to leaving our home, our neighbors, our friends—the old ones and the new ones.

Then he’d turned around and declined the megaphone in Richmond too.

I didn’t see that coming.

Except that I did. Ever since I told him about Mission Up, ever since he saw Deedee’s painting and I repeated to him the words she’d said about not being distracted by your own reflection but looking through the glass, this rupture has been coming. A new giddiness has entered our relationship.

“Are we really going to do this?” he’ll ask.

“I think we are.”

Maybe it was like this in the days after I told him about my pregnancy. Without skipping a beat, he’d started making plans for our future. One of the things about Rick I admire is how quickly he can reorient. When that reorientation involves an “everything fast,” I hate it, but now I love his spontaneity again.

Next to Jim, Kathie’s pressing a finger into her temple, moving her head from side to side. She opens her mouth, as if to adjust for changing air pressure. The ringing in her ears must be getting to her. I’ve been watching for this since they arrived. Now more than ever, I feel for Kathie. Longing for the clarity that comes through silence.

“You wanna take a walk?” I ask.

She blinks. “Okay. Yeah. That would be nice.”

The men both rise. Rick is anxious. “If you leave, what am I supposed to do when people come to the door?”

I’m not sure if it’s the trick-or-treaters he’s worried about or being left alone in the house with Jim.

“It’s simple,” I say. “They’ll do all the talking. You just hand them the candy.”

As if on cue, the doorbell rings. A toddler in a tutu, a ten-year-old princess, and a couple of teenage vampires stand in a huddle under the porch light. They hold out plastic jack-o-lanterns, a shopping bag, and a very optimistic pillowcase. Into each of them, I dole out candy from the bowl stashed near the entrance. Out on the sidewalk, the toddler’s mom waves hello. She’s pushing a plump little devil in a stroller.

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

I hand the bowl to Rick and lead Kathie out into the night.

She wears a lovely pair of knee-high leather boots that make a sharp tap-tap-tap on the pavement. I ask about the tinnitus, which she says is getting worse. Despite the doctors, she has stopped believing the problem is stress-induced. There’s something wrong with her, objectively wrong, only they haven’t managed to diagnose it.

“Cognitive therapy is a crock, Beth. Don’t let anybody ever talk you into it.”

“I’m sure it helps some people.”

“It makes me want to stick needles in my ears. I wouldn’t mind losing my hearing, honestly, if only this ringing would stop.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t know. I can’t think straight. Don’t listen to me.”

A couple of high school vamps walk past, their legs sheathed in fishnet. Kathie turns to watch them. I shake my head.

“We didn’t do it that way when I was in school.”

“Didn’t you?” she asks. “I was a wild child, remember? Lots to regret.”

The way she says it doesn’t sound like she regrets too much.

We run into a tiny ghost wearing an old-school sheet with eyeholes. True to form, the holes are slightly misaligned, which forces him to wobble as he walks. Too young to be out on his own, I think, but this is Lutherville. There are people here who still leave their doors unlocked. I can only imagine what Deedee must think, seeing all the Halloween ghouls standing in for her desert fathers.

“I have to say, for a woman whose husband has just quit his job and then turned down the opportunity of a lifetime, you seem amazingly calm.”

“You’ll see why. We’re on the same page, me and Rick. Things are a lot like they used to be. I have plenty of good reasons to worry, you’re right. But I’m a lot less worried than I was a month ago.”

We circle the block before heading back. To my surprise, as we pass the Smythes’ house, Margaret and Deedee are out on the front porch, handing precious Zagnuts out to the children of Lutherville. We line up behind a couple of Harry Potters, a Dr. Who, and some zombies, waiting our turn to say hello. Margaret insists on our taking some candy.

“I’ve never had one of these before,” Kathie says.

Margaret gives her a sly grin and gestures with her cast. “You be careful, then. They’ll ruin you for anything else.”

“Will we see you in the morning?” Deedee asks.

“We’ll be there.”

As we walk across the yard, Kathie asks what I meant.

“One of the things Rick wants to show you is a mural in the church up the hill.”

“The Catholic church?”

I nod. “Then there’s something else. Down in the city.”





When it’s time for bed, Rick and I walk the Shaws into the backyard, where we have a little surprise for them. I have converted the shed into a guesthouse. There’s an antique bureau on loan from the Smythes, a lovely four-poster bed, and heavy drapes over the windows. In the hearth, a golden fire gives the room a warm glow.

“It’s so . . . romantic,” Kathie says.

It is certainly that. Rick and I exchange a look.

“In the morning, we’ll all have breakfast, then start over to the church.”





I’ve rarely been to a Catholic service. It’s the opposite of the formless meetinghouse ritual of my youth, but also unlike the stage show at The Community. Apart from the costumes, there are no production values to speak of. The priest’s voice, in contrast to the majesty of his getup, has a droning, high-pitched quality that never varies. There’s a lot of kneeling and standing, and by the time I get the hang of it, the whole thing is over except for communion.

Rick squeezes my hand. “You trust me, right?”

“I guess I have to.”

“Seriously. You do trust me.”

“Yes. I do.”

Kathie sits beside me, heavy-lidded but for once apparently not in pain. Beside her, Jim continues to fidget as he’s done all morning, not a big fan of being kept in suspense. Even Roy, who isn’t much of a churchgoer, sits on the pew in front of us, not bothering to attempt the liturgical movements, contenting himself to gaze absently at Deedee’s mural, which is now revealed.

After the final prayer, we join the press of parishioners moving toward the nave for a closer look at the newly painted wall.

“This is what you want me to see?” Jim asks.

“It’s one thing, yes.”

Every time I look at the mural, I see something new. A familiar structure I hadn’t noticed before. A huddle of saints underneath one of the basketball hoops at the park. Since the first time, I’ve come back almost every day. The individual saints no longer resemble each other. I feel like I can tell most of them apart. Someone made a count and reported back to Deedee that there were two hundred and thirteen figures in all. “Better count again,” was her reply. I suspect they missed the halo in her mother’s bedroom window.

Standing next to Jim, I can feel his resistance. Still frustrated by Rick’s decision, he doesn’t want to submit to whatever plan is in store. The whole experience has left him irritated, from the dodged calls to the terse bids for more time to the cryptic request that he travel up to Baltimore for his answer. As the crowd thins and he gets closer to the wall, however, I can sense a change.

“It’s very unusual,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“She’s a famous painter.”

“Your next-door neighbor? I am impressed.” Then he casts his gaze higher and notices St. Rick. “What in the world?”

Last night, while Kathie and I walked, Rick took the opportunity to explain his retreat to the shed. I’m not sure how much detail he went into, but it doesn’t take Jim long to make the connection between the hermit-like Fast and Deedee’s painting.

“Are you beginning to understand?” I ask.

“No, Beth,” he says, trying to laugh. “I think it’s a little over my head.”

“You know what I think? Rick thought he’d find the answers by getting away from everything. He felt so strongly he had to shut the world out . . . including us. When he saw this, he realized that the answers weren’t in the shed. They were out in the world. They always had been. We just didn’t see them.”

“We?”

I nod. “We started off on separate paths, but we seem to have arrived at the same place. Literally.”

What I don’t tell him is this: Rick and I spent our own night together in the shed. We talked and talked the way we hadn’t done since before we were married. At nightfall, we had separate ideas we both wanted to share, two different stories of our autumn apart. By morning, there was just the one story, and just the one ending too.

“You can’t do it alone,” he said. “We can’t do anything alone. Not anymore. We have to be together on this, on everything.”

And he means it.

Deedee and Roy join us for lunch after church. One of the surprises of the last couple of days of October: Deedee’s interest in Mission Up. I forget she doesn’t fit the cloistered, fearful suburbanite mold I try to shove everybody into. Though she’s never been to the place, she has already started talking about it with her circle of friends. Roy has already felt the pressure: “I don’t know what I’m donating to, but Deedee tells me I have to do it, and I’m to see you about the details.”

After lunch, there’s a negotiation over which cars to take. Jim offers the Maserati and Roy the Rolls, but after a lot of persuasion, they agree we can all pack into the Volkswagen and Deedee’s old Saab. Marlene and Jed turn up, and she offers to take Eli with them. We set off with me behind the wheel and Rick beside me, the Shaws in the backseat. In Deedee’s car, Roy looks nervous to be a passenger. I imagine he’s accustomed to doing the driving.

Once we’re on the highway heading into town, the general vicinity of our destination dawns on Jim, who concedes the logic of going as low profile as possible, not taking the fancy, eye-catching cars.

“I don’t think my insurance covers driving in West Baltimore. With any luck, we’ll get in and out before anybody knows we’re coming.”

Rick turns around in the passenger seat. “Oh, they’ll know. We’re going to make quite an entrance. There’s a whole mob of people waiting for us.”

I put the blinker on to make a left. I’ve made the journey often enough now that the route is familiar. As I begin my turn, a red SUV streaks head-on through the intersection, forcing me to slam on the brakes or be flattened.

“Is everybody—”

My words are cut off by the screech of brakes over my shoulder, followed by a jarring thump as the car rolls into us. The VW bucks forward, metal grinding.

“—okay?”

Nobody’s hurt. We get out to inspect the damage. A young man in a little Japanese pickup hops out and starts sputtering apologies: “My bad, my bad.”

Deedee, stopped behind the pickup, cranes her neck out to see what’s happened. As we gather around the back bumper, Marlene pulls alongside with Jed beside her and Eli in back.

“Go on ahead,” Rick tells them.

The little pickup appears undamaged apart from a scrape on the chrome. The VW has not been so lucky. The bumper has a notch in it that looks like somebody chopped it with a giant, blunted axe blade. The left taillight’s busted too. On the ground there’s a shower of yellow and red plastic bits, some fine slivers of metal, and a bent Jesus fish.

I stoop down and retrieve the fish. The shiny surface has lost its sheen. The collision’s impact had an effect similar to scrubbing the plastic with a wire brush.

The pickup driver offers Rick his insurance information, still murmuring apologies. To my surprise, Rick declines. “It doesn’t look too bad. Nobody’s hurt. The guy responsible is the one who ran the light. Let’s just call it even, all right?”

“Are you sure?”

After much reassurance, we all get back in the VW.

“Maybe you should drive,” I tell Rick. “That was nice, letting him off the hook.”

“Today of all days, I’m in the mood to be forgiving.”

“If he’d rear-ended my Maserati, I don’t think I could be so calm,” Jim says.

Rick laughs. “I hear you. Anyway, that guy did us a favor. I’ve wanted to get rid of that fish ever since Beth stuck it on the car.”

“Don’t be down on the Jesus fish,” I say. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

In my lap, I nestle the broken Jesus fish, carefully probing the damage with my fingertip. All beat up, I think I like it a whole lot more.





Chas Worthing knows how to turn a drum circle into a street party. A row of grills stands along the sidewalk outside Mission Up, manned by Chas, Barber, and even Vernon, who turns out to have at least one shirt in his closet not devoted to the legalization of cannabis (even if it does read BAN WALL STREET in angry black letters on a white background). Most of the familiar faces from the Rent-a-Mob have shown up, along with friends roped in for the occasion. True to his word, Chas has even managed to get a WBAL news van out here. Get Mother Z on camera and hopefully she’ll receive some more support for the community. She was game. I think she’s got a lot of showmanship inside that body.

“You’re a pushover,” I say, giving him a big hug.

He laughs, unaccustomed to the contact. “Hey, I get it. Like I told Marlene, I’m not above helping out other people’s causes.”

One day Chas will see there are no such things as causes. Only people. But that’s not going to come overnight. Believe me, I know.

I say hello to Barber, who’s already handing out hot dogs to some neighborhood kids, then sidle up to Vernon.

“You’re here,” I say.

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this. There’s actually something to do here. That’s what excites me. And besides, if things get out of hand, turn a little ugly, we both know I can handle myself.”

“Yes, we do.”

Marlene passes behind us. I reach for her hand before she can get away. “Thanks for everything.”

“It’s cool,” she says. “I told you they’d love to be part of it.”

“And you were right.”

I give her a hug before turning her loose. If I’m not careful, hugging people is going to become the theme of the day. And so many people! I have to walk up the steps for a better view of the crowd. In addition to the Rent-a-Mob, there are the women and kids of Mission Up, along with plenty of others from the neighborhood. The news cameraman jerks this way and that, uncertain what exactly to film. I feel the same way. The amazing thing is, most of these people weren’t even a part of my life a month ago. Now they’re all here together, mingling, getting to know each other.

Holly arrives, dragging a reluctant Eric behind her. She’s dressed to work in paint-flecked jeans and a pullover sweater. Eric carries swinging cans of paint in each hand. She finds Deedee and in two minutes flat, they’ve got the cans open and they’re discussing color. From a distance, I see a dipstick covered in hot pink.

“Have you seen Marlene?”

I turn to find Jed, his arms filled with a huge bag of hot dog buns. “She went that way,” I say, then watch my son ducking into the mission in search of the girl he loves.

At the foot of the stairs, Jim and Kathie are taking it all in. Rick leans close, explaining everything. I walk over to check on them.

“Beth felt something coming here, and I feel it too,” he says. “We’re not going to spend the rest of our lives chasing after fulfillment. We’re going to spend them serving.”

“Sure,” Jim says, “but how are you planning to pay the bills?”

“I’m not going to take the job in Richmond. But we can go to work for you right here. Beth and me. I’ve talked to the folks at The Community, and they’re open to this as well.”

I make my exit, not wanting to dwell too much on the financial uncertainties. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I really don’t. But I’ll take this uncertainty any day over the cloud I lived under before October. We’ll get by, I’m certain of that. When I told Rick I trusted him, I wasn’t lying. But it’s not him I’m depending on. Not by a long shot.

Seeing Jim and Kathie here, the couple who, without realizing it, set our family crisis in motion, brings everything full circle for me. We are all together now, either in body or in spirit, all of us players in a drama we had no idea was being performed.

Each with a role to fulfill in this jigsaw of happenstance.

Mother Zacchaeus made this place out of nothing; she gave shelter to Sam, whom Gregory brought me here to fetch.

Eli, whose flippant remark drove me into the arms of the Rent-a-Mob, and whose experimentation made me return to Mission Up. Marlene and Jed, whose budding attraction healed my relationship with Chas and his group.

Even Holly, who finally got me to the beach where everything seemed to click.

Rick, my husband, more like himself than ever before, who taught Deedee the answer without knowing it, so she could teach it to the rest of us through the medium of her art.

And what was I in all of this?

I started out hoping to reconnect with my lost sense of purpose. My life once had a course that, in their own way, each of these people had helped to derail.

Or so I thought.

Now I find that what life was making of me, what God was making of me, was not an arrow to trace a path through the sky, but the hub of a wheel. I am the intersection, I am the connection between them all, and the purpose I’ve been given isn’t mine alone. It is for all of us to share. What I needed wasn’t something I could take. What I needed was something I could give.

“Look what you did,” Mother Zacchaeus says, after telling the reporter all about Mission Up. The woman is a star.

“It wasn’t me.”

She smiles. “Good answer.”

Do we hug? I’m not sure if she’ll allow it. There’s only one way to know for certain. I reach for her, and she submits to the embrace.

“All right,” she says. “All right.”

“I know it must seem like a lot, like we’re trying to take over—”

“You got that medal I give you?” she asks, cutting me off.

I pat my pockets in vain. “Not on me.”

“Come here, then.”

She plucks another pin from her chest, then comes at me. I’m sure this time she’s going to sink it deep. But no, she pulls on my shirt, sticks the pin through, and reaches under to fit the back with surprising grace. Not so surprising, though: I imagine she’s been doling out such rewards for quite some time. I peer down at my new decoration, which bears a red cross within a white flower.

“It’s lovely.”

“You done all right,” she says. “I knew you would.”

“How?”

“I know these things, Beth. Jesus help me, sometimes I wish I didn’t!”

Behind us, Rick has roped Eric Ringwald into the circle, and now Eric is explaining to Jim that, yes, he’s going to see to organizing the nonprofit. His wife, Holly, he says, will be on the board. Hearing her name, I turn to find her. She and Deedee are just inside the mission. While the crowd outside grows and some local trumpeters join in with the drums, my two friends are on their knees side by side with a pair of paint scrapers, making quite a mess.

“Elizabeth, the more I looked at this thing, the more I felt I had to do something about it.”

So I spend ten minutes watching my famous neighbor, the only person I know with a Wikipedia entry, teaming up with my soul sister to lay a fresh coat of hot-pink paint on the front door. It’s a beautiful sight, indeed.

“Have you seen Eli?” I ask.

Holly shakes her head. “Maybe out on the street?”

I head to the street, interrogating Jed and Marlene, who can only shrug. I ask Rick, who’s too caught up in conversation, then scour the lines in front of the hot dog grills. When I’ve nearly given up, when my heart has just started to contract, I hear the sound of basketballs bouncing on boards. Down the street, among a group of neighborhood kids, Eli throws the ball, lets it bounce, then jogs over for the rebound, only to have it snatched from under him by a boy half his size. He wheels around, jumps, and misses as the kid sails the ball over his head.

“You even let that one come down here again.”

Aziza, right beside me, exhales a cloud of menthol into the air.

“He can’t play basketball too good, though, can he?”

“He’s holding back,” I say.

She harrumphs.

“Okay,” I admit. “He sucks at basketball. He’s better at lacrosse.”

“White boy sport.”

“Yup.”

We cock our heads at one another and laugh.

Maybe he senses that he’s being talked about. In the middle of a throw, Eli ditches the ball and turns. He sees me, gives me a nod. Coming from him, it’s as potent as a loud “halloooo” and a grin from ear to ear.

“What’s those glasses he’s wearing? Those are girls’ glasses.”

The white plastic frames look terrible on him, I have to admit.

“Those are mine,” I tell her, feeling so proud.

They’re all here, the people I love and the people I want to love. There are no robes, no halos, not that the eye can see, but there are souls, plenty of those. We are all packed in together, filling a small block in a small part of a big city in a big world, overlooked by the blue throbbing fullness of a sky that was always there.

And all the raised voices and the music and the spring of balls bouncing rise together like so much incense, an offering of noise, the sound of people living.

Nothing here is empty.

No space is void.

No place unoccupied or unclaimed.





Reading Group Guide





1. Have you ever felt your world turn upside-down like Beth does—the “sky beneath her feet”? How did you respond? What did you learn from the experience?

2. As a pastor’s wife, Beth’s life and choices are often dictated by others’ expectations. How does she handle those expectations? In what ways do they affect her own faith and relationship with God? Is living under such close scrutiny unique to families of clergy or does everyone experience this?

3. When Rick decides to retreat to the shed in the backyard, what do you think he could have done differently so Beth wouldn’t feel abandoned? What could she have done differently?

4. The Sky Beneath My Feet is rife with symbols, e.g., the Jesus Fish and the portrait of St. Rick. What are some others? What do they represent within the story? Do you have similar symbols in your life?

5. How have Beth’s views of the Quaker faith changed since she was a teenager? How does her faith change over the course of the novel?

6. Beth is emotionally close to her brother, Gregory, despite—or maybe because of—his messy past. When he asks for her help with Sam, she agrees. How would you react in a situation like this? Would you be afraid of Mother Zacchaeus or of being around the people at Mission Up?

7. Eli’s experimentation with marijuana seems to be a growing occurrence among teens these days. How do you teach your children to avoid drugs? When they ask why it’s wrong, what will you tell them?

8. Beth experiences a very profound moment under the hut at the beach. How is her life changed by that moment? Have you ever had such an experience?

9. When you are offended or done wrong by a loved one, how do you handle the situation? Does forgiveness come easy for you or do you find it to be a challenge?

10. What has Beth’s journey taught you about your own life?





Acknowledgments


My deepest thanks to J. Mark Bertrand, without whom this novel would never have come to be what it is. And to my agent, Chip MacGregor, a man who sees possibilities I never knew existed, thank you. Ami, thank you once again.


About the Author

The Christy Award-winning author of Christianity Today’s Novel of the Year Quaker Summer, Lisa Samson has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “most powerful voices in Christian fiction.” She lives in Kentucky with her husband and three kids.