Then a few minutes later, a man got up to speak, and as soon as he began, I forgot all of what the woman had said—even the most basic idea of it. And that’s part of the problem with the Quakers, at least to me, because in the end no matter what a person says in that room, it will always be misunderstood, then forgotten.
Roger and I were quiet for a while after this. We kept walking. I could see that his white shirt had gone translucent with sweat at the armpits and the center of his back. The dog panted and occasionally growled at nothing in particular as he led us down the sidewalk, his feet moving quickly on and off the hot pavement. Sometimes I felt we were all breathing in unison, other times it seemed we had no relationship to one another, that he was walking and I was walking and neither of us was even aware that the other was there, that even if I hadn’t been there, he would have told this story to the dog or to the lawns or the trees or the air.
What I’m trying to say is that I understand why a person might want to be quiet for a while. And you don’t have to say anything, if you’re not ready. You don’t have to say anything at all to me, if you don’t want to.
We went on. I looked forward, down the long sidewalk. Somehow the streets had that feeling, that holiday feeling—and I wasn’t sure how I knew this feeling but I did know it—a vague sense that everyone is gathered somewhere else and they don’t plan to come out until it’s over, until whatever it is that is happening is over. No cars were moving. No people walking. Only sprinklers spinning water in great, dissolving arcs and me and this dog and this person making our way through the heat, walking toward what I did not know.
But at some point you have to ask yourself, Roger said, whether remaining silent is something that is having a positive effect or a negative one on your life. You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.
We walked for a while longer. I stopped paying attention to the sidewalk or trees or heat. Eventually I heard Roger unlatch a gate. We went up a gray stone path to a gray stone house. The front door was unlocked. The air inside felt like that of a cave. Light blue walls and the furniture, too, was all upholstered in blue variations—navy sofa, teal rug, and water-colored curtains.
I’ve worked with cases like yours before, he said. Or, well, not exactly like yours, but very similar. There’s a family at the church who adopted a refugee child, an orphan from someplace having a war, and even though they had been told the kid was fluent in English, he had a pretty bad case of nerves when he arrived, wasn’t speaking at all. Actually, I believe you’re going to visit them, Hilda mentioned that they’ll take you to dinner at their house tonight. Anyway, Nelson—that was the name they gave him for some reason—after I worked with Nelson for only a few weeks, he was fine. He had seen such terrible things, his whole family killed, his neighborhood bombed, but there’s really nothing a person can’t overcome, you know—and for me, I think that’s because God really is looking out for each of us. I’m not saying you have to believe that if it’s not right for you—I’m not that sort of Christian that thinks everyone has to believe the exact same things for this to work—but I do believe that I can use what I know and feel to help you.
Roger pulled out a large binder and opened it on the table in between the chairs where we sat. It was full of simple drawings in plastic sleeves, all the lines unsteady. He flipped through a few of them before stopping at a page covered in thin lines. A small purple form was lying at the bottom of the drawing and above it were various human-looking shapes, red scrawl spewing from them. The forms were intricate but inexact—a hole not clearly an eye or a mouth, a long gray shape either a gun or sword.
This is one of Nelson’s drawings of a dream he has had since he was very young. He kept having the dream after he moved here, but after we worked together for some months, he stopped having the dream.
Roger smiled and looked at the drawing awhile longer before closing the binder and putting it away.
You see, what sometimes happens is that a person is witness to terrible things or sometimes those terrible things happen directly to a person and even though that person will usually stop consciously thinking about those unhappy memories in order to move on and function in society, sometimes a part of a person’s mind won’t stop thinking about those terrible things until we find a way to express it, until we find a way to get it out of our head. For Nelson, expressing these things in words was just not possible, but drawing helped him stop thinking about the past and start thinking about the present. The family that took him in—I mean, his new family, his legal family—they have been very fortunate so they can provide everything that he needs. Nelson doesn’t have to worry about anything, so he doesn’t. It’s very simple—you can’t allow yourself to be troubled by trouble that’s not there. Now Nelson is a very easygoing guy, and I’m proud of him, for overcoming everything. When you meet him, you’ll see—he’s still quiet, but he’s calm. You’ll see.
WE STOOD ON THE DOORSTEP of a house so large you couldn’t even see much of it from the street—half of it hidden behind trees and sculpted hedges. Hilda rang a doorbell, and the more I thought about entering the house, the less it seemed possible that I could be let into such a house—that I was somehow not large enough to be inside this house, that it was simply not for me to know. Could someone call this a house? Could a person really walk up to this thing and believe it to be the person’s home, larger than a school, larger than most churches?
A woman answered the door saying so much and so quickly—Welcome, welcome, it’s so good to see you, come on in, it’s so nice to have everyone over like this! Come on in and get out of that heat. Her hands moved around wildly, waving us in, grabbing the boys by the face and kissing them, wrapping her arms around Hilda and Steven and finally landing on me—
Aren’t you just a doll? Aren’t you though? Isn’t this one just the sweetest, have you ever met a sweeter doll than this one? Have you?
No one answered her. The woman clutched me for a moment—My name’s Kim, but everyone calls me Kitty, so you can go ahead and call me Kitty—then waved her hands around, conducting us down a wide hallway.
Everyone’s in the den having cheese and crackers and I hope you’re hungry because I told our girl we were having special company and she just about pulled out all the stops. I went back there to check on her this afternoon and she was making things I hadn’t even imagined about! And listen, y’all, if you need the restroom, it is just down this hallway here, down there and over to the right—of course I’d give you the full tour but it would just about take all night, and anyway I don’t think any of the kids made their beds and I guess they hardly ever do so I don’t know why I ask! Why do I even ask!
She stopped and picked up a bowl of white flowers from their spot on a marble pedestal.
Holly Henry did all these florals and didn’t she do so good? She is so gifted. I have her come out here for all the holidays and the Forgiveness Festival, parties, things like that—and isn’t this one nice here? I don’t even know where she gets magnolia this time of year, she must be flying it in from somewhere. China? Imagine that, flying in magnolias from China! But they do smell nice, don’t they? I do wish the magnolias bloomed around the festival—wouldn’t that be nice? Have a good smell of them, go on—