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Awakening

By Claudia Cangilla McAdam

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“I hate you!” I slammed the door into the jamb with a boom, and it shivered the walls down the hall and into the living room and dining room. The china in the cabinet tinkled against glass shelves. The grandfather clock in the entry groaned a gong, even though it was still ten minutes before the hour.

In my bedroom, the knickknacks on the bookshelf tottered and rattled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the trophy on the top shelf wobble and teeter side to side, like a drunk staggering along a line. I stretched out my arm, but too late. It somersaulted to the floor. The golden, pony-tailed soccer girl, her leg outstretched with ball balanced against her arch, landed upside-down on the floor. Her head and foot snapped off, and the rest of her body broke free from the trophy’s pedestal.

“Ouch!” I said, rubbing the back of my head, as if the injury had been to me and not to the figurine that was supposed to represent me.

I picked up the pieces. The “MVP” plaque had popped off the fake marble base. “Most Vocal Person,” I said, changing the real meaning of the abbreviation. “Why can’t I just keep my big mouth shut?” I dumped the mess onto my desk.

I raked my fingers through my hair—long, like the soccer girl’s, but not straight and golden like hers. Mine was as dark as night and it bumped its way down my back in waves that could turn into ringlets if the humidity was high enough.

My belt loops scraped against the door as I slid down and sat on the floor. A human doorstop. I half expected my mother to storm into my room for another showdown. She wouldn’t get in here now even if she did try to bust in . . . or come softly knocking in a few minutes, calling my name.

It hadn’t gone at all like I thought it would. I was so happy when I walked through the front door. It’s not every day that someone like Tabby Long invites you to go with her family to their mountain cabin. Cabin, nothing. It’s a two-story, four-bedroom, three-bath palace with a hot tub on the deck and two snowmobiles perched on a trailer in the three-car garage.

“Tonight? They’re going up tonight?” Mom asked. She slid her chair back slightly from the kitchen table and turned her book over to hold her place.

Although it was upside-down, I could pick out one of the words in the title: Exodus. That seemed right. It was an exodus from this house that I had planned.
“Actually, before dinner,” I said. “Since we don’t have school on Holy Thursday or Good Friday, Mr. Long wants to leave early to beat the Easter crowd. This is the last weekend the slopes will be open. And if we get up there by dinner, he can night ski under the lights."

Mom glanced up at me. She knew all about Mr. Long’s eye disease. Some scary-sounding thing called uveitis. The white part of his eyes looked horribly bloodshot most of the time, and a ring of cloudiness circled the irises. Tabby said that he could go blind.

“He can’t ski during the day anymore,” I said. “The sunlight reflecting off the snow hurts his eyes. This might be the last time he can see well enough to ski at all.”

She nodded her head. “I know.” She looked squarely at me. “They don’t think his eyes are going to get better.”

If that was true, then surely she’d let me go. “Tabby says that sometimes the pain is so bad, he can’t go to work. Please, Mom? I don’t know when they might be going to the cabin again—if ever.”

“But you’ve only been back to school since Monday.”

“I feel fine.” I swallowed hard without flinching, as proof that the strep throat that kept me home for a whole week was completely gone. So what if it still hurt a tiny bit? She didn’t need to know that.

“It’s not that,” Mom said. “Your school work. You’ve got a lot to make up.” Her raised eyebrow challenged me to deny it.

“I’m a fast reader, and I get good grades.” Well, usually. “I’ll bring it with me. I’ll work on it every day.” Yeah, right.

Mom stood up and paused for a moment, her eyes on the table. I could tell she was considering it. “And when would you be back?” Her head cocked toward me.

I silently drew in a big breath. This was it. “Sunday morning. I’d be back in time for the last Easter Mass, I’m sure,” I quickly added.

Mom nodded, still thinking, and kneaded her forehead with her fingertips. She knew how important this was for me. Tabby may have been the new girl at school last September, but now there was no one in the whole eighth grade more popular. Some of the other girls had spent weekends at her cabin this winter. And now, with just two months left of school, she had finally asked me.

Mom slipped back into her chair and placed her palms on the table. “Ronni, this is the Easter Triduum. Why would you want to be gone during the holiest time of year?” She spread her fingers and raised them slightly to punctuate her question.

She wanted to know why? Wasn’t she ever my age? Didn’t she remember what it was like to have fun?

“But I’ll be back in time for Easter Mass.” Even if I didn’t want to be. “Mr. Long will be sure to get me back whenever you say.” That’s it, suck up. “He’s always on time. I think he got that from being in the army for so long.”

“And the Mass of the Last Supper tomorrow? Did you forget you were supposed to serve?” I had. Why did I sign up to do that? Being an altar server when I started two years ago in sixth grade was cool. But now . . . I was going to quit at the end of the school year. I was only still serving because Mom wanted me to.

“And you’d miss Stations of the Cross on Good Friday,” she said. “What will you be doing instead?”

Just about anything else, I wanted to say. “I don’t know . . . we—”
“He died for you, you know.”

Here we go again, I thought. “Well, I didn’t ask Him to!” Mom opened her mouth, but I didn’t let her get a word out.

“Dad would have let me go.” That was a low blow, for two reasons. One, because Dad wasn’t a Catholic. And two, because it hadn’t even been a year since Dad and Steven died. I started to say something else, then promptly shut my trap. Talking about Dad and Steven was like picking at a scab. I didn’t feel like adding a scar today.

Mom shut her eyes and pinched her lips together in a thin line. She thought she could dam up the pain that way. She was pretty good at it. She opened her eyes and looked at me straight on, but she didn’t rise to the bait. She didn’t say anything about what Dad would have done. We both knew that that didn’t matter. Not now.

“So you don’t understand why the Lord suffered and died for you? For us?”

“No,” I said honestly.

Why would anybody die for somebody they didn’t know? I mean, I got the whole bit about salvation. Forgiveness of sin, getting to heaven. It was the sacrifice part that didn’t make sense to me. Couldn’t that have happened any other way? I guess I had a bit of Doubting Thomas in me. I believed in Jesus, I really did. I just never understood why He had to die. I always wondered why no one really tried to stop it. I would have. His death seemed so unfair. I just didn’t get it. Nothing was worth dying for.

“And you think you’re going to learn why our Savior died for you while you’re at Tabby’s? I don’t think so. Pay attention during the next few days, and maybe you’ll get it.

She stood up, the chair legs scraping harshly against the wooden floor, and she huffed into the living room. I knew exactly what she was doing. She’d settle into the rocker, and either pick up her knitting or grab her rosary from the end table, praying to the Blessed Mother to give her strength. Or to ask her Son to do something to save my soul.

One time she had entwined her first two fingers together and held them up to me. “Mary and I are like this,” she had said. She had grown up without a mom, so I could understand her turning to Jesus’ mother for comfort and help. I knew what it was like to have a parent leave you, dying for no good reason.

I had to give it one more chance, but I couldn’t think of a convincing argument. I followed her into the living room. “Please?”

No answer. I stamped my foot. “You never let me do anything!” A lie, and still no answer. “You are so mean!” And with that, I stomped off to my room.

As I sat on my bedroom floor, tears pooled behind my lower eyelids; mini waterfalls tumbled down my cheeks. My throat felt like I was wearing a too-tight turtleneck. The glands under my jawbone seemed swollen and achy. The backs of my hands itched. My eczema became irritated when my nerves got out of whack. I scratched at the scaly patches until they almost bled. Ugly hands. I hated them.
“Ronni!”

At first, I wasn’t sure I heard my name being called, but a tapping on my bedroom window confirmed that I wasn’t hallucinating.

“Ronni!”

Ohmigosh! I’d forgotten I’d left Tabby standing on the front porch while I went inside to talk to Mom. I hauled myself off the floor and leaned over my desk to slide the window open.

She stood on the other side, the sun highlighting the paler streaks in her blonde hair. With no screen between us, she propped her elbows on the windowsill and rested her chin in her palms. “I guess you’re not coming.”

“You heard?”

The dimples in her cheeks showed themselves. “It was hard not to. It sounded like a bomb went off in there.”

I plopped into the desk chair. “Sorry.”

“Why don’t you come anyway?” Her eyelids closed slightly as she leaned in a bit. “Just grab your stuff and climb out the window,” she whispered. “Look what I brought.”

She dug into the pocket of her fleece jacket. Blue, of course. Tabby always wore blue because she said it brought out the color of her eyes. Only her clothes weren’t just “blue,” to hear Tabby describe them. Her pajamas were “robin’s egg,” her swimsuit “azure,” her favorite blouse “aquamarine,” and her velvet skirt “cobalt.” Lucky for her our school uniforms were blue. Or should I say “navy”? I don’t know what she would have done if she’d had to wear Sacred Heart School’s fire-engine red.

“Here,” she said, pulling from her pocket a DVD in a clear plastic case: The Wizard of Oz. “We can watch it together at the cabin.”

For our big assignment in religion class, we had to pick a classic movie from Mr. Josephson’s list and analyze the religious themes in it. A month ago I’d picked my all-time favorite oldie-but-goodie, and Tabby picked the same one.
Mr. Josephson had given us permission to team up and work on our paper together. That’s how we started to be friends.

“Just come,” she said again.

For a moment I was tempted. We’d probably be up at the cabin before Mom even called me to set the table for dinner.

“I can’t. I’m supposed to serve at Mass tomorrow, and . . .”

Tabby grunted. Loudly. “Doesn’t all this church-goin’ ever get to you?” She folded her arms across the sill and stared at me.

Tabby’s family wasn’t Catholic. They weren’t anything, as far as I could tell. She said her folks sent her to St. Augustine’s for the discipline and the academics. It sure wasn’t to learn the faith, even though she was required to take Mr. Josephson’s religion classes.

I glued my eyes to the desk and rolled a pencil back and forth under my palm. When I realized my scaly hands were exposed to Tabby’s full view, I quickly slipped them behind my back and deliberately didn’t look at her. My teachers and my friends may have known about my eczema. That didn’t mean they liked looking at it. I certainly didn’t.

I never let people see my hands, if I could help it. The eczema along my cuticles caused my nails to thicken and grow out yellowed and bumpy. I’d tuck my hands between my knees when I sat, or cross my arms and fold my hands under my biceps. I loved winter when I could pull long sleeves down as far as they’d go—to my fingertips, if I was lucky.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, my eyes still on my desk. “I really want to go to the cabin. Maybe you could ask me again some other time—”

“Hi, Mark!” Tabby’s voice came from far away. I looked up. She had left the window and was walking past the neighbor’s open garage where Mark was working on his car. She wouldn’t ask me again. There wouldn’t be another time for me.

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