Triptych. April Vinding
looked to see Dad smile at them and caught him with one hand still on his Bible, placing it aside. The burgundy paper cover had gold letters: Serendipity Study Bible. For groups and lay leaders. I caught him lingering over it.
The voice in the air put aside consequences, declared willingness to be a fool, and told everyone listening that what happened next came of his want and his intention. Dad turned to give Mom a kiss, his eyes intent as the record spun.
On the left side of the sanctuary, on the outside edge of the light, I can see myself as a little girl sitting beside her mother. The little girl’s fingers touch the cover of a hymnal, feeling the painted red bookcloth to the edge of the embossed gold letters. The copperplate capitals have sharp cliff edges and flat smoothed valleys. Her finger settles in the valley and strokes the cool center of the t. It’s like the cross on the front wall of the room, above the sunken basin used for baptisms the children walk in dry after Sunday morning service as they jump around the stage steps and hide under the choir chairs.
The sanctuary smells like old hymnals, their edges faded to pink and daubed with inexplicable water spots, the pages cream and knit with the aroma of attics and tape. The congregation tonight is wide and shallow in the varnished pews. The ceiling is low and unspectacular, the carpet and pew cushions scratchy with yellow and green flecks. The back of the church is dark, only the front row of lights is on. In true Protestant fashion, everything here is electrical, practical: there’s no candlelight or arched stone—the dark windows are clear paned glass that opens, in the light, to let the summer breezes in for coolness more than atmosphere.
A man with white hair and glasses is talking at the front of the church, in front of a music stand, with the raised pulpit darkened behind him. The little girl knows he’s a missionary. She’s here alone with her mother, who wanted to hear the man. She’s the only child in the room, her mother like a sort of sister, the next youngest in the group of white hair, pleated skirts, and pinstriped overalls. The man speaking uses no microphone. He’s come from China and will go back there to keep working on translation.
I see the little girl listen, nested in the seat, her sitting body the same size as the angle of the pew. Two ls resting exactly in each other. The wood of the pew hurts her back, but she doesn’t fidget, she’s listening. And thinking.
The man speaks about love and protection. He uses the words ‘heaven’ and ‘Father’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘hell.’ But ‘hell’ with a sadness of loss—his voice lowers as he says it—the way people speak of a child or a friend who has not just left but cut ties and run away, not from any building or person called home, but from the place inside themselves that recognizes it.
Small as she is, the little girl can recognize this kind of hurt. It shocks me to see her see it. She thinks it sounds like birds at night. Loons and geese and the loneliness of flight in a dark sky. I know now she’ll feel it every time she finds herself in an airplane at night, moon or none, and will wonder at how very close it is to peace, how there could be such a small distance between the deepest kind of good and the unbottomed hollow.
Though she doesn’t think this in the church pew, she senses the feather of dark around the back of the sanctuary and the black pressed hard on the window glass. She knows there are two kinds of boundaries—not just between right and wrong—but in all reasons why. She wants them all to be window panes, solid and clear, with the simplicity of being either outside or in. She wants love to be recognizable by noise, to buzz or hum, or duty to give off a smell, like clean porcelain sinks or animals. She wants to know who loves her.
In the church, the white-haired man asks if anyone would like to come to the front. This is an action, a clear separation as easy to read as a window being open or closed. The little girl is scared of hell, but mostly she craves the clarity, somehow wants her body to mark an absolute. She turns to her mother and says, quietly, “I want to go up there.”
The mother’s heart turns over in her chest. She takes the little girl by the hand and they walk up the side aisle, up the stage steps and into a shadowed corner. There’s a shuffling at the front of the church as someone goes to find something: they weren’t expecting children. The white-haired man talks to the little girl. He has glasses and a square sort of face with baggy cheeks like a grandfather who always has a book. Someone brings a small pamphlet, the best they could do: a tract with cartoon people drawn in it. The little girl looks at the people in the pamphlet in their balloony red and blue clothes and at the black-lettered words around them. She smells the flat walked-on carpet.
She listens, and she thinks.
She’s heard people talk about what it feels like to do this: light, like the moment at the top arc of a pushed swing. She wonders if doing it will help her see why there are storms. Or why Dad brings flowers or stops for signs—because he wants to or because he should. It’s important to her to know which.
The little girl breathes through her nose and feels the man’s warm hand on her small shoulder. After he finishes talking, she wraps her fingers around each other, closes her eyes and tilts her head. She doesn’t feel anything, no swinging, or hear anything, not a hum, so she figures all this must have to do with what you see. With her small nose almost touching her soft knuckles, she prays, decides to become one of the faithful, and frames the world so duty is the entryway to love.
Now that we’ve moved, Mom and Dad whisper a lot. Dad comes home from the bank in suits and ties, his hair is short now above the shirt collars, and they whisper in the kitchen before dinner. And we don’t pray “God is great, God is good . . .” Dad prays quietly thanking God for things like “sovereignty” and “strength.” After dinner, Dad sits in the living room with papers from the bank and Mom does dishes in the dark kitchen and tells us to go play in one of the bedrooms. I ask why. Mom says, “Daddy needs some quiet.” Mindy says, “Why?” Mom says, “Sometimes it’s hard for Daddy to be at work.” Megan says, “Why?” Mom says, “It’s hard for Daddy to work with Grandpa at the bank right now.” Grandpa didn’t come to Christmas this winter.
I heard there was an emergency at the bank and Grandma had to call Grandpa when he was away. She started calling all the hotels to find him at his conference. But when the hotel people found his number, a lady answered the phone.
Grandma and Grandpa went to court over the bank. The court said Grandma gets it, and Dad’s still going to work there. I wondered at my birthday if that was why Grandpa didn’t send a present. I asked Mom if that meant Grandpa didn’t love me anymore.
Before she answered, Dad yelled from the corner of the table: “Moo-oo-ooo-Wah-Ah-Ah-Ah!” and Meg and Mindy ran away screaming, “April, run!” “The Monster will get you!” Dad belted the monster laugh again and I ran from my chair to Meg and Mindy. We tore around the house hiding in closets by the sleeping bags or squishing behind the doors. Mindy and I peered through the hinges while Dad stomped up to the door. “Where are those little girls?” he said in Monster voice. We peeked too hard and he caught us through the crack. “I see you! Moo-oo-ooo—Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah!” We were trapped and he caught us and put us in the jail in the entryway. Before he walked away we yelled to Megan: “Megan! Come save us! We’re in jail!” We warned her he was coming upstairs to get her. She slid down the stairs on her butt, we heard the thump-thump-thump, then her sharp eyes ran toward us and she tagged our hands.
After our game that night we had birthday cake. It was shaped like an owl with coconut and licorice eyes. Dad said a prayer before I had my wish. He said, “Heavenly Father, thank you for April and how special she is to us. Help her to know that nothing will ever change how much we love her.”
I can see the moon out my window tonight. It makes the tops of the cars glow as they drive by. Mom and Dad are saying prayers with Megan and Mindy in their bunk beds. We danced in the living room tonight when Dad got home so Meg and Mindy got to stay up past their bedtime. I came up to put my pajamas on and to crawl under the covers. After Mom and Dad tuck me in, sometimes I get up and turn on the light again so I can write. I keep a notebook with light purple paper and a pencil behind the little sliding door at the top of my bed.
Sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep at night. Dad has the same problem. When he sneaks me popcorn after bedtime,