Two in the Office

There's not a lot of room for guests in here ...

I sit at a plastic folding table to write, not because I love plastic tables but because the window at my shoulder opens onto the woods and all they offer: branches and bluebirds, squirrels and sunlight, the rare bear. My two visitors must have come in through that window, like the sunlight, because they didn’t use the door. Didn’t make a sound either. One moment I was alone and the next I wasn’t.

I did what you would do: jumped to my feet. Right? Of course you would. My leap jarred the desk, sent my pencils clattering to the floor, splashed the coffee from my cup, which clattered too as it rolled to a stop.

“What the—?”

“Jonathan Fairbanks,” declared the man who stood before me. A pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose, and he held an open Bible in one hand. He closed it, tucked the spectacles in his waistcoat pocket, then bowed his head by way of introduction.

Wait. The waistcoat I recognized. I'd dressed him in that waistcoat when I imagined his day of judgment at the start of this chapter.

“Okay,” I managed.

“Bridgett Travers,” said the woman to my side, smiling as she bowed her head in turn. She tugged at her tunic, then clasped her hands at her waist. I knew that tunic too. And something about her posture suggested ... what was it?

Spunk.

Could have been the tilt of her chin.

Jonathan bent to retrieve the pencils, returned them to the desk.

Wow. I rubbed my eyes, opened them again.

They were still with me.

“I’m sorry, but I have only one free chair,” I said, pointing toward the red leather recliner in the corner of the room.

“No matter,” Bridgett said. “We’ll stand in your shoes.” She smiled again, having stolen my line. Or had I stolen hers? I felt a bit dizzy. “We always do.”

“Always?”

“We’ve known you your whole life,” Jonathan replied. “As we know all our kin. Past, present—and future.”

I’m not sure why I still make a to-do list every morning, because I’m retired. “Engage ancestors in conversation” wasn’t on it.

“So you’re both from … heaven?” I asked.

“It’s not what I expected, I must confess,” Jonathan said. He was scanning the contents of the bookshelf by his side, brushing his fingers along the spines. Books lined the shelves of the hutch and the wall behind me too. Jonathan took them in and nodded.

“A room full of books,” he said. “Such riches. Where would I find your religious treatises?”

“But what is it like?” I asked.

“What?”

“Heaven!”

“Ah,” he said. “Right. Not a walled garden, as I was led to believe, but rather a state of mind in which one roams freely. And there are more souls wandering about than I expected, that’s for certain. Souls of all sorts, some more worthy than others. Disconcerting, to say the least. But pleasant enough.”

Maybe my next question should have been my first. “What are you two doing here?”

“You are the answer to your own question,” Jonathan replied, “because you reached out to us."

"I did?"

"By telling our stories," Bridgett interjected, "you invited us to share our own thoughts about our lives." A smile. "More or less. You see, you’re not the only one who wants to leave the grandkids with things to think about.”

“Not only the grandkids.” Jonathan again. “I’ve got something for you to think about too.”

“Uhm.” I welcome feedback, at least in theory. “Okay.”

Jonathan cleared his throat. “I’ve been reflecting these many years on what it means to live a godly life,” he said. “We got some things right—and some things wrong.”

“Such as?”

“I am all for family and community,” Jonathan continued, his tone now earnest, his eyes locked on mine. “And I believe everyone must have a North Star, as you say—but I also believe the stars reveal something transcendent, a divine presence that knows us better than we can know ourselves. To live in that light is to live a godly life. To prescribe precisely how, as if there could be no more than one way—that was the great mistake of my time.”

A shake of his head. “My time spent beyond life has opened my eyes to that. But at least we were wrestling with the questions that mattered. To displace our reliance on divine, eternal guidance with faith in—what, exactly? Self? Stuff? That is the great mistake of your time, and you suffer for it.”

He paused to let this settle.

“You know what you don’t believe,” he added. “How can that be enough?”

I don’t typically go this deep this quickly with good friends, let alone ancestors I’ve just met. Still, I reacted as I always do when challenged. I countered.

“You pledged to live in a spirit of everlasting love.” My cheeks warmed, my words quickened. My shield was up. “That’s about belonging. But you devoted yourselves to judging each other from the start. Judgment divides. It doesn’t bind. And surely, we suffer from that example in my time too.”

Jonathan pursed his lips. We stood together in silence until Bridgett broke it.

"Hmmm." I glanced her way, saw the smile playing again at the corners of her lips. She had taken my great-great-grandfather’s Guinness bottle from its spot on the hutch, next to Brenda’s gardening books, and turned it to read the label. "Bottled in 1908. A good year for beer?"

“I’ll explain the bottle later in the book.”

"Looking forward to it!" She put her smile away and the bottle back, then plucked a slim book called Falling Upward from among its neighbors. A book about growing from failure, one of my contributions to the shelf that holds Brenda's Bibles and a few other ... well, I suppose you could call them religious treatises. It's a small section.

“I’m afraid there comes a moment when we all fall short of what we should be," she said, holding the book for Jonathan to see. "Even promised what we would be. All of us are prone to judgment and subject to being judged. Which is why everlasting love can only begin with forgiveness.”

I actually felt my shoulders relax. “That I can believe in.”

"It's not so easy," said Bridgett, who fanned the pages, then handed the book to Jonathan.

I righted my coffee cup, tugged a few tissues from their box to absorb the spill. “How so?”

Jonathan fanned the pages too, scanned the back cover, then frowned. "Written by a priest, I see."

“Forgiveness takes effort,” Bridgett said. She drew a kerchief from her pocket and dabbed at the last of the coffee. “And courage.”

Jonathan returned the book to her, spotted a baseball on another shelf and picked it up. "God knows our sins,” he said. “And God judges.”

“My God forgives,” Bridgett replied. “But I’m not speaking of God. I’m speaking of the person you wronged, or the person who wronged you.”

She returned the book to its shelf. “To ask forgiveness is to engage in a conversation,” she continued, “in the hope of wiping the slate clean and starting anew." She leaned against the edge of the hutch, brought her hands to her lap. "Forgiveness demands something of the wronged and the wrongdoer both. And I suppose that's what makes it so very hard. But without it, wounds never heal."

Jonathan put down his Bible, returned his spectacles to his nose, and held the ball before his eyes.

“It’s a baseball,” I said.

“Oh, I know. We try to keep up. But we thought little of games in my day. I’ve never held one.”

Throwing a baseball takes me back to childhood. “Toss it in the air,” I offered.

“No. I couldn't.”

“Go ahead.”

He shrugged, then flicked the ball toward the ceiling and watched as it fell to the floor with a thud and rolled to a stop against the wall.

“Next time, catch it too,” I said, then turned to Bridgett. “I hope you found forgiveness. And found a way to give it.”

This time her smile was rueful. “I'm afraid I left the wounds to fester. So did Henry. Then it was too late. And now I know what’s undone in life remains undone forever.”

She stood and led me with her eyes toward Jonathan. But why? He was back to scanning the books on the shelf.

"Ahem." It was Bridgett, clearing her throat. I turned to her, opened my hands—what? "Best as well," she whispered, "not to leave difficult conversations hanging."

It took me a moment to understand.

"Jonathan?" I said.

"Yes?"

“I’m sorry. But I can’t bring myself to say the words I’m expected to say in church." I placed my hand on my heart. "I don’t feel them here.”

He emptied his lungs, softly, stood silently. “I believed the words,” he said at last. “Still do. But I feared I couldn’t live up to them—feared failing before God most of all.”

“So that’s what held you back?”

“That’s it.”

We considered each other. Finally he stepped to the desk, reached across it to squeeze my shoulders with weightless hands, and smiled.

“Tell the grandkids to ask themselves this question,” he said. “Tell them to ask, what will guide my life? Tell them the answer must involve something bigger than they are, something that calls forth their best. Something I know as God.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he was beginning to fade.

“They can name it as they wish,” he added.

“Tell them love dies without forgiveness,” Bridgett said, fading too. “And that forgiveness comes harder than they think. It takes work, and it's scary.”

“I will.”

She brightened again. “Oh,” she said. “One more thing: tell the girls to stand up for themselves. They’ll need to.”

Jonathan turned to Bridgett, started to speak, thought better of it. I picked up the baseball and extended it to him. “Go ahead. Take it.”

“I’d like to, actually,” he said, “but we can't take anything back that we didn't bring with us.” He returned the ball to the shelf and picked up his Bible, which was beginning to fade too. “So, what are you going to write about next?”

I had gone back and forth on that myself. “The century of violence.”

Jonathan winced. “A terrible time,” Bridgett said. “But a story that must be told.”

“I can let you know when it’s finished.”

“Oh, we’ll know,” Jonathan replied. “The braided cord.”

“It connects us all.”

“It connects us all.”

“You’ve been circling this subject for a while,” Bridgett said. “It’s a hard one for us too.”

My guests were gone. A voice, whose I can’t say, lingered long enough to whisper: “Best to just take it on.”

With that they left me, alone with my thoughts, standing in the sunlight.

(What now? You can jump to the top of this page or go to the full story index—but you've reached the end of the line when it comes to Days of Judgment!)