Susan Meissner - Why the Sky Is Blue Read online

  Why the Sky is Blue

  A Novel

  By Susan Meissner

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  PART TWO

  18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Epilogue

  Reading Guide

  Meet Susan

  Other Books by Susan Meissner

  What does little birdie say

  In her nest at peep of day?

  Let me fly, says little birdie,

  Mother, let me fly away.

  Birdie, rest a little longer,

  Till the little wings are stronger.

  So she rests a little longer,

  Then she flies away.

  What does little baby say,

  In her bed at peep of day?

  Baby says, like little birdie,

  Let me rise and fly away.

  Baby sleep, a little longer,

  Till the little limbs are stronger,

  If she sleeps a little longer,

  Baby too shall fly away.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  For my Papa

  PART ONE

  Claire

  1985

  Prologue

  I had awakened that May morning in 1953 with a voice lingering in my ear that both awed and frightened me. It was like God himself had whispered to me, and the echoes of his message had shaken me awake. I could feel the words swirling inside my four-year-old head—more sensation than actual sound. A father-voice had whispered Do not be afraid.

  I had slipped out of bed and made my way to the kitchen where my mother was making coffee. I remember asking her if Daddy was home, that I had heard his voice from my bed. A queer look had momentarily swept across her face, like she almost believed her husband was indeed only a room away instead of a world away. She knelt down, hugged me, and told me it must have been a dream. Daddy was still in Korea. She finished with the coffee pot and began to cut a piece of toast into pieces for my little brother Matthew who was sitting in his highchair.

  I remember staying in the kitchen for several minutes after she rose from her knees, pondering deep thoughts while Matthew banged the metal tray in front of him with a spatula. Had I dreamed that deep, penetrating voice? Or was it really God who had spoken to me? I remember trembling at the thought that either could be true. Even now, years later, I can remember feeling anxious that I had been able to dream up the voice of God. The only other explanation was that it actually had been the voice of the Almighty. I didn’t know which one was more unsettling. Not then and not now.

  I would grow up believing, however, that I had been let in on a terrible secret, because later that day men in uniform came to our door. It was late in the afternoon. Matthew was napping, and I was quietly playing with my dolls like my mother had asked. I saw a black car drive up and park in our driveway. The first man that stepped out of the car looked just like my father. He carried nothing in his hands but a white envelope. I ran to the picture window in the living room, amazed that my dad had returned from Korea without his duffel bag and brown leather suitcase. Another man got out of the car, and he sort of looked like my father too. A third one got out. He wore a little cross on his hat. He was carrying a book. A Bible.

  The rest of that day is a blur. I don’t remember the men telling my mother that my father’s plane had been shot down and that he had been killed. I don’t remember her wailing, though years later she told me neighbors had to go looking for me when her anguish sent me running from the house.

  What I remember most vividly from that day is the sound of that voice that had awakened me. That is why, thirty-three years later, when I heard it again, there was no mistaking it.

  1

  When I heard the voice of God for the second time in my life, I was still recovering from what everyone around me quietly called The Attack. The two words were said in whispers behind my back as though I could not handle hearing them. My family and friends could have shouted the words if they had wanted to. I didn’t and still don’t remember any of it. I cannot remember the night a man hurt me in the worst way a man can hurt a woman. I don’t remember him wrapping his big hands around my throat in a failed attempt to squeeze the life out of me. I had to be told what I had survived. A doctor informed me a couple of days later in a hospital that things might be fuzzy as I recovered. That was the word the neurologist had used. Fuzzy.

  What I remember, I call The Waking Up. I woke up in a hospital bed with injuries but no idea how I got them. When I said as much to the neurologist—slightly painful for me due to bruised vocal cords—he said that was normal. I told him I didn’t remember anything about that day after breakfast, even though the attack occurred sometime between eight and eight-thirty in the evening. That, too, was normal, he said.

  There is nothing normal about any of this, I wanted to say to him.

  “I don’t remember why I love Tennyson,” I said instead, feeling a tear slip down my cheek and not knowing why.

  He fidgeted then. I could tell we were leaving the realm of concrete medical data regarding the brain and entering the world of the unknowable mind. It was fuzzy indeed.

  In a gesture I found genuinely compassionate, he took my hand, leaned over my hospital bed, and told me that some memories would return to me, others wouldn’t. There would be no way of knowing what my mind would be capable of remembering and what it wouldn’t. He then gave me some rather good advice, which I failed to appreciate until later.

  “If you can’t remember why you loved Tennyson, then find new reasons for loving what he wrote,” he said. He paused, and I could tell he was choosing his words very carefully. “You are very lucky to be alive, Mrs. Holland. I have seen other people with injuries like yours who never leave a hospital bed.” In the days that followed, I tried to think of myself as being lucky, but the thought never seemed to fit the reality.

  That seemed especially true that October morning, a month after I left the hospital, when I awoke with God’s voice floating through my head—the same voice that stirred me awake as a child the day I heard my father had died.

  I actually had two startling revelations that morning. One was from God—at least I think the message was from him. The second discovery I came across on my own as I rose from bed contemplating the first. An unexpected wave of nausea swept over me when I stood up, and as I brought my arm to my abdomen, it brushed across my breasts. A sensation I had felt only four other times before in my life stunned me. I staggered to the toilet, lifted the lid, and began throwing up.

  My retching was a physical response to a physical condition, and it took me only a moment to realize this. But as the seconds ticked by and I began to grasp the horrible reality before me, fresh waves of nausea gripped me. This second round of heaving had nothing to do with morning sickness.

  I was pregnant. I was pregnant with a child that I was certain had started growing in me in the quiet hours after the attack— the attack I cannot even remember. In a moment unwitnessed by anyone in the emergency room or in the quiet room on the fifth floor where I was taken later, a life had begun to shape itself within me. It was a life I already knew would tear me in two. The man who had tried to kill me—and failed—had instead, it seemed, started killing me in another way.

  As the heaving subsided and I was left with only my disbelief, I lay across the cool tile of the bathroom floor and prayed that I would wake up. Surely I must be dreaming. In the fog of misery that was clouding my thinking, I could hear my husband, Dan, downstairs telling our eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, to make sure she turned her curling iron off. Then I heard Spencer, our six-year-old son, asking for Trix for brea
kfast. A quirky thought ran through my head that we didn’t have any Trix. It slipped away like a lizard you’re not quite sure you saw.

  For a very brief moment I wished my attacker had finished the job. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I wanted to be dead. But the voices of the three people downstairs, whom I loved deeper than life, drifted up to me, and that morbid thought skittered away. However, it was replaced by a despair that surprised me by its weight.

  The message God had given me that morning hovered over me as I lay curled up on the floor like a sleeping child. It was a four-word message that I would spend the next eight months trying to understand. God knew what I was about to face. He knew I would struggle to comprehend how he could have let such a thing happen to me. He knew I would seriously doubt his love, his care, his wisdom. He knew there would be many moments when I would teeter on the edge of having no faith at all.

  So while I would have expected his message to be something like, “Do not give in to bitterness,” or “Do not lose heart,” or “Do not doubt,” I was surprised that it was none of these.

  His message to me was the same one he had given me the morning I learned my father had died.

  Do not be afraid.

  2

  I am amazed by the strength—and fragility—of the human body. I marvel that it can do so much yet has so many limitations. Only a deity could create something so wonderful and yet so weak.

  And it awes and alarms me that the body can act so independently of the soul.

  My body—my brain—has never allowed me to recall what happened to me the night I was attacked. I’ve been annoyed by this kind amnesia only in snatches of moments. Most of the time I’m comforted by my mind’s profound, benevolent refusal to remember.

  When I first came home from the hospital, I was haunted by the fear I would suddenly remember everything. The specter of recollection crouched on the fringe of just about everything I did and thought. I worried it would all come rushing back in a deluge, and I also worried it would come back bit by agonizing bit, like a slow torture. I didn’t know which would be worse. In the end, it didn’t matter. The last thing I remember about September 9, 1985, is eating a bagel for breakfast. That day ends just after breakfast in my mind. My next memory is waking up in a hospital in the wee hours of September 10.

  Now my amazing body, so valiant in its earlier endeavor to shield me from images I shouldn’t have to relive, seemed to have turned traitor on me that morning I realized I was pregnant.

  As I lay on the cool bathroom tile waiting for my world to stop spinning, I was keenly aware that my body was busily building cell upon cell within, growing a person like me, but not me, within the darkness of my insides. My wonderful, self-protecting brain, which had survived asphyxiation, and which then proceeded to protect my emotional state with selective amnesia, was ironically facilitating the growth of life in my womb.

  The first time I learned about the human body’s autonomic systems, I was in junior high school. I was intrigued to discover that we do not notice when blood vessels change size or when our hearts beat faster or when our pupils dilate. In high school I studied ancient Greek and learned that autonomic means “self-ruling.” At the age of thirty-six, on the floor of a bathroom, I learned what that really meant: I wasn’t in charge of anything.

  Which is why the turmoil of my morning had done nothing to interrupt the mysterious, creative process at work within me. I rose off the floor changed forever, but inside me things were moving right along—as they had minutes before when I was still asleep and blissfully unaware.

  Though completely undone emotionally and physically, I instinctively knew I needed to get up and make myself halfway presentable. It was just minutes before Becky, a good friend and our pastor’s wife, would be at the house to pick up the kids and take them to school. She had done this every morning since I had been attacked. I used to do it.

  Katie and Spence would be coming upstairs to say goodbye to me. I didn’t want them to know what I knew. I didn’t want them to worry about me. They had already worried enough to last a lifetime.

  I grabbed the marble counter to steady myself as renewed nausea teased me. I turned on the faucet and splashed water on my face, looking into the mirror to gauge if I would be able to pull it off. My eyes were puffy and red, my face ashen. The swelling on my neck had long since gone down, but the bruises that encompassed my throat like a necklace were a sick shade of pale yellow. I looked terrible.

  I shut the door, put the toilet seat down, and sat on it, holding a wet washcloth to my head. I would say goodbye to my children from behind the door. I had a sinking feeling if I saw them—my own flesh and blood—I would burst into tears. There had been enough of that.

  There would be no fooling Dan, however. He would never leave the house without making sure I was okay for the day. He had only just the week before begun working full time again. Dan is a veterinarian with a group practice in Minneapolis. His two partners—both alumni and good friends from the University of Minnesota—had been generous with allowing him time off, but Dan is the best small-animal surgeon in the group, and they’d missed him while he was away taking care of me. He, too, would be coming up to say goodbye. But I couldn’t think about that right then.

  Within moments of my shutting the bathroom door, I heard footsteps. Spencer was first.

  “Mommy?” he called.

  “I’m in the bathroom, sweetie,” I said as brightly as I could. “Can I owe you a kiss and a hug? I kind of have a tummy ache today.”

  “’Kay,” he said and bounded away.

  Katie must have been right at the bedroom door.

  “Watch it, Spencer,” she said gruffly. “This is hot.”

  “Well, you’re in the way,” I heard him say, each word becoming softer as he ran out of earshot.

  “Mom, I brought you a cup of coffee,” Katie said to me, waiting.

  “Thanks, hon,” I managed. “Can you put it on the nightstand and I’ll get it in a minute? I’m feeling a little under the weather, but I’ll be okay in a little bit.”

  Despite my faked cheer, I set off an inner alarm.

  “Do you want me to get Dad?” she said, fear thick in her voice.

  “I’ll be okay, sweetheart.” I lied. “I’ll see you this afternoon, okay? And you can tell me about your day.”

  She paused.

  “Okay, Mom,” she said. “I love you.”

  It was the first time she had ever said it first.

  “I love you too.”

  I heard footsteps trailing away from the door. I was alone again with my thoughts.

  No one would have been able to understand this, so I’ve never told anyone—not even Dan—that a tiny part of me was at that very moment energized at the thought of being pregnant. It sounds so incredibly out of place, but I knew that the little sliver of elation was a remnant from those other times when Dan and I had desperately wanted children and despaired of ever having any. Or of having more than one.

  I met Dan my senior year at the University of Minnesota in 1970. He was finishing up his graduate work in veterinary science. He was studying late one night in one of the carrels at the main library, and so was I. Neither of us was looking for romance. I had just ended a relationship that had been going nowhere. Dan was consumed with completing his doctorate and finishing up his internship. I was sitting across from him, and I dropped my pencil. It hit his shoe. He bent down, picked it up, and handed it to me. It was as simple as that. We started talking and realized we were attending the same Twin Cities church. We had other things in common too. We both loved classical music, Italian food, thunderstorms, and the color blue. We laughed over the things we didn’t see eye-to-eye on like sports teams, bestselling authors, and cars.

  When the library closed, we went to a coffee shop and left several hours later as good friends. In a year’s time, we were married. I was teaching high school literature, and he was starting a veterinary practice with two of his classmates.

&n
bsp; We had only been married for a year, choosing to stay in Minneapolis after graduation, when we both felt ready to start our family. In hindsight I guess it wasn’t that long before I became pregnant, but at the time, I thought trying for more than a year was impossibly difficult. My monthly cycles were unpredictable, so it was hard for me to tell when I was ovulating. Even my gynecologist told me mine was a frustrating case. When I finally did become pregnant with Katie, I had complications halfway into the pregnancy and had to be on bed rest until the month before she was born. I had a lowlying placenta, I was told. Toward the end of my third trimester, the placenta moved upward to the place where it should have been all along, and Katrina Noelle was born on December 21, 1973, with no complications.

  I went back to teaching part-time when Katie was nine months old, and Dan and I decided to forgo using any kind of birth control because of how long it had taken to conceive Katie. In July 1976, while the nation exuberantly celebrated its bicentennial, I miscarried a little boy at fifteen weeks gestation. In 1977 I miscarried again, this time at nineteen weeks. We gave this little girl a name, Sarah—a name I still treasure and whisper from time to time.

  When I became pregnant with Spencer the following year, Dan and I decided that whatever the outcome, he would get a vasectomy. We wanted this child so badly, but neither one of us could emotionally handle the death of another baby. We prayerfully committed this child to God’s care, just as we had the others. I moved downstairs into the living room and literally lived on the couch for the next seven months, surrendering my teaching job. The previous miscarriages had left some uterine scarring, furthering my chances that, again, the placenta would be in the wrong place. At eight months into the pregnancy, I began bleeding. We hurried to the hospital, where Spencer was delivered by Caesarean, tiny but healthy.