It was after six when I pulled into the garage at home, but Kathleen’s space was still empty. I called her cell, but the call went straight to voice mail, which meant either that she was on a call or that her phone was switched off. She hadn’t left a note on the kitchen table, the usual place for notes; when I checked for messages on the home phone, I found voice mails from half a dozen reporters—including Athena Demopoulos of Nashville’s Channel 4 and Mike Malloy, Fox 5 News!—and, at the end, a message from Kathleen: “Hi, honey. I’ve gone to a meeting at the Wellness Community. A support group for people with cancer. I’ll call you when I get done.”
I listened to the message three times. Its matter-of-factness baffled me; from the brevity and the tone, she might just as easily have been telling me that she was at the grocery store, or swinging by the public library to return a book. I hung up the phone and wandered back to the bedroom, thinking, How did this happen? How did we become the cancer family? I half expected the doorbell to ring, and to find myself face-to-face with a neighbor delivering a casserole and pity.
Sitting on the bed to take off my shoes, I noticed the nightstand drawer slightly ajar. I reached out to close it, but then—instead—I slid it open. Nestled deep in the drawer, hidden beneath a wavy, outdated telephone directory, I found it: the nine-millimeter pistol loaned to me by Decker—Decker, who had foolishly, and perhaps fatally, put himself within striking distance of Satterfield’s fangs.
CONTRARY TO HER MESSAGE, KATHLEEN DID NOT call; she simply came home, unannounced, sometime after nine. “Tell me about the support group,” I said, anxious—desperate, perhaps—to reconnect with her; to feel that I was somehow a part of the experience, a part of her experience, a partner.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” she said, and I felt hurt and excluded. “I’m exhausted. What I’d really like is to take a shower and go to bed. Can we do that? Could we just curl up and go to sleep?”
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
But I’d promised more than I could deliver. I lay awake for hours, trying to sort out the tailspin that was now our life. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of Job—a pair of cynical, sacrilegious dreams, both of them set at the end of Job’s tribulations.
In the first dream, God bent down and ruffled Job’s hair, scratching him behind the ears as if he were a dog, cooing, “Who’s a good boy? Job’s a good boy! What a good boy!” Then God lobbed a treat into the air, whereupon Job leapt into the air and caught the morsel in his mouth.
The second dream was even stranger than the first. In this one, God looked like a TV game-show host—specifically, like the host of Let’s Make a Deal—and Job was a contestant who had just won. To celebrate Job’s victory, the angel Gabriel gave a loud blast on his trumpet, and the Almighty beamed beneficently as the heavenly hosts clapped and cheered. When the applause subsided, God commanded, “Gabriel, tell Job what he’s just won!” The angel lowered his horn and said, in a silky announcer’s voice, “God, Job’s Grand Prize package starts with one thousand fertile female donkeys. But that’s only the beginning. To work the fields, Job gets a thousand teams of oxen—a total of two thousand oxen!” A woman in a skimpy robe led a donkey and an ox out to stand on the cloud beside Job. “To travel the deserts in style,” Gabriel went on, “Job receives six thousand new top-of-the-line dromedary camels! And to round out his livestock portfolio: how about fourteen thousand fluffy sheep!” As another woman led out a camel and a sheep, Job raised his arms exultantly, and the angels cheered again. “But that’s not all, God,” continued Gabriel. “To make sure he has plenty of time to enjoy his new prosperity, Job gets another one hundred forty years of life!” More ecstatic applause ensued, along with a chorus of strumming harps; Job gasped and wiped away tears of gratitude with the sleeves of his robe. “Last but not least, Lord, Job gets a fabulous new family—ten new kids, twice as smart and good-looking as the old ones!” As the children appeared, all ten of them, Job whooped and hollered, pumping his fists in the air triumphantly.
I woke up at that, shocked from sleep by the irreverent image. As I got my bearings—lying beside Kathleen, outwardly in the same way I had for the past three decades, but with everything between us now changed—I found myself thinking about the one key character who had not appeared in my sacrilegious dreams: the same character who hadn’t, I suddenly realized, appeared in the Bible story’s happy ending. Job’s wife, I thought. Where’s the woman with the broken, bitter heart? I also thought of the ten new children. Were the new children conceived and carried by the same old wife? Did they fill the void left by the ten dead ones? Or are some losses beyond recompense or redemption?
I lay still, listening—listening for a whirlwind, and a Voice within it offering eloquent answers—but all I heard were crickets and cicadas, and the waning wail of a freight train keening somewhere in the distant dark.