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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
"I was desperate. . . . I couldn't turn off the dark thoughts, no matter how hard I tried or how much I prayed. And then I spent a whole weekend in bed, and the crying wouldn't stop, and I got really scared. I've had bouts with depression before—it's kind of a cloud I've learned to live with—but this time was different. I felt like I was going under, like I'd never feel hopeful again, and then that just made my anxiety worse and it all spiraled from there." Wren Crawford is a social worker who finds herself overwhelmed with the troubles of the world. Her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression are starting to overcome her. She finds solace in art, spiritual formation, and pastoral care along with traditional therapeutic interventions. But a complicated relationship from her past also threatens to undo her progress. Fans of Sharon Brown's bestselling Sensible Shoes Series will be delighted to discover some old friends along the way. As Wren seeks healing in this beautifully written novel, readers are invited to move beyond pat answers and shallow theology into an experience of hope and presence that illuminates even the darkness.
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For David, my beloved son
You inspire me with your courage, compassion, and wisdom. Words can’t express how much I love you and how proud I am of you.
The light shines in the darkness,and the darkness has not overcome it.
JOHN 1:5
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Contents
Part One
EVEN
THERE
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
It’s so beautiful here, if only one has a good and a single eye without many beams in it. But if one has that, then it’s beautiful everywhere.
PROLOGUE
February
It was the sighing, the news article read, the awful sighing that caught the woman’s attention in the half-light of morning and led her down to the beach. She said the young whales were the worst, their splashing frantic, their moans tortured.
Wren Crawford closed her laptop and pushed her sandwich aside on her desk.
She knew better than to spend her lunch break reading stories about whales beaching themselves by the hundreds half a world away. She could barely manage her own daily intake of sorrow working with traumatized women and children at Bethel House. She didn’t need to read about another potentially futile rescue mission. Her current therapist, Dr. Emerson, would agree: limit exposure to faraway tragedy and anguish as much as possible. Her job provided more than enough for anyone to absorb.
She fixed her attention on the many children’s drawings and paintings taped to file cabinets and tried to shake the whale image, but it was no use. All she saw were the volunteers with their buckets, laboring to keep the survivors cool and damp by dousing them with water, desperately cooperating with a high tide to turn the creatures upright and coax them out into safety. Then they would form a human chain and try to keep the rescued ones from stranding themselves again. Already the carcasses were strewn for hundreds of yards along the New Zealand coast. It would be several days before they could assess whether any of their efforts had succeeded.
She picked up her phone to text Casey, her best friend since middle school. He might tease her for being sensitive, but he wouldn’t condemn her.
Need a mental reset, she wrote.
What for?
Beached whales in New Zealand.
How about kittens somebody dumped in the alley?
Wren punched his number. “How many?”
“Three.”
“Where?”
“Inside the dumpster. Heard them crying when I took out the trash.”
She would never understand cruelty. Not to animals, not to children, not to any who were vulnerable. “Where are they now?”
“Playing with my shoelaces. And ow! Biting me. Hey, hey, Theo. Here—play with this.”
“You already named them?”
“Just one.”
“Does Brooke know?”
He laughed. “Not yet. Not sure how she feels about cats.”
Wren hoped his long-distance fiancée would approve. “Well, you’re a good man, Casey.”
“Or a sucker for cuteness.”
“Either way . . .” A coworker appeared in her doorway with the familiar Sorry to bother you but there’s an emergency look on her face. Wren held up a single finger to indicate she’d be there soon. “I’ve got to go. But maybe you can investigate whether there’s a no-kill shelter or a cat rescue agency? And they’ll probably need to go to a vet. What’s your schedule like? I’ve got to work late.”
“It’s okay. I got it. We’re not shooting anything today.” Casey, a freelance videographer, had been working for months on a project highlighting human trafficking in West Michigan. “But come by after work, okay, Wrinkle? I need to talk to you about something.”
“Okay.” She took one final bite of her sandwich. “But if there isn’t a safe place for them . . .”
“I know, don’t worry. Then I’ll keep them here until we can figure something out. And hope they don’t destroy my couch in the meantime.”
“Thanks, Casey. You’re a star.”
“Each of us lighting our own little corner of the world, right?”
Yes, she thought as she hurried down the hallway. In the midst of all that was crooked, dark, and despairing, Shine.
There was a sketch by her favorite artist, Vincent van Gogh—a pencil, chalk, and ink drawing of a gnarled tree with exposed roots, half torn up by a storm, yet clinging to the earth. Vincent had seen within the tree roots an image of the struggle for life, for hope. He understood it.
That was the picture that came to mind as she listened to her coworker recount the story of the latest referral: a mother beaten up by a boyfriend who had been pimping out her four-year-old to his friends. She’d come home from work early and discovered it.
Wren wasn’t sure if she was going to faint or vomit. She only knew she had to find a way to cling to something solid. Like Vincent’s tree roots. She gripped the edge of the table where she and Allie were sitting.
“You need a minute?” Allie asked.
Wren nodded.
Allie set aside the police report. “I keep thinking if we were in Chicago or Detroit, I might not be surprised by all of this, but Kingsbury . . .”
Exactly. In college Wren had been stunned by statistics on abuse and human trafficking in West Michigan. That’s when she had decided to put her compassion to good use and be part of the rescue mission in Kingsbury and beyond. But the darkness was relentless.
She bit her lip. She was not going to cry. Because if she started to cry, she might not be able to stop. Is that happening a lot? Dr. Emerson had asked her a few weeks ago. Crying that won’t stop?
Not a lot. But some.
At work?
No. She managed to hold it together at work. But it was exhausting, always being on high alert, always bracing for the next crisis, always living on the verge of losing control and crumbling.
She stared at her hands and pictured Vincent’s precarious tree.
Would you be open to getting some more help? Dr. Emerson had asked. Maybe taking a break from work?
She couldn’t. They were already understaffed, and still, the kids kept arriving at Bethel with their moms. She glanced out the window at the February gloom. “The baby whales are the worst.”
“What?”
She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud. “Nothing.”
Allie paused, then said, “Are you okay? I mean, not just about this, but in general. You’ve seemed a little off lately.”
Wren tried to receive the observation as concern rather than criticism. “Just feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything.”
Allie nodded. “Well, don’t let the enemy drag you down. This is frontline stuff, right? You’ve got to take up your shield of faith and fight back against the darkness. That’s what we’ve all got to do.”
Wren sighed. “Some days I don’t have much fight left in me.”
“I know. Me too. That’s why we’ve got to keep renewing our minds. We’ve got to take every thought captive because otherwise”—Allie motioned toward the hallway—“all this will pull us under.”
And on the days when she didn’t have the energy to take thoughts captive and renew her mind? On the days when the undertow of grief and fear was too strong to resist? Then what?
Allie seemed to be reading her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter how we feel. We’ve got to stay grounded in the Word. It’s the only way to survive. The only way through is to pray. Constantly.”
That was exactly what Wren found hardest to do whenever the darkness pressed in. She didn’t have the energy to read the Word or pray. But she wasn’t going to say that to Allie. She didn’t need guilt and judgment layered onto her sorrow. She pushed back her chair. “I should get in there, meet Evelyn and her mom.”
Allie eyed her with compassion. Or was it pity? “Tell you what—how about if we swap places today and I do the intake for this one?”
Wren was going to argue. She was going to assert her competence, demonstrate her resilience, and prove to Allie she was emotionally and spiritually fit to push back the darkness and fight the good fight. But she didn’t have the strength for bravado. And besides, with all the legal and medical complications involved in this type of case, she couldn’t risk missing something. Or falling apart in front of everyone. So she said, “Thanks, Allie.”
“You’d do it for me.” Allie picked up the folder. “You’ve still got time on your lunch hour. Why don’t you head to the art room? Take a deep breath, center yourself.”
Good idea. Wren retrieved her phone from her desk drawer, then went to the art room and closed the door behind her. She would paint and listen to music. That would help center her. She chose a few tubes of acrylic paint from the storage closet, set up an easel and a small canvas she had already primed, and selected one of her favorite songs, “Vincent,” for inspiration.
Starry, starry night, Don McLean sang as she squeezed cerulean blue onto her palette. Like Vincent, she could paint in blue and gray.
Look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Vincent knew. He understood. He was a companion in darkness.
She mixed the blue with a bit of violet until it was almost black. Then she spread the gloom onto the canvas with thick impasto strokes, sculpting the dark into shadowy mountains and caverns. Strokes of contrasting yellow would brighten the sky, but she didn’t want it brightened. The purple darkness soothed her.
She stepped back and scrutinized the scene. She would blur the violet with gray and smudge the clouds into a brooding haze. Nothing luminous about it. Not like Vincent’s dark, which shimmered with light.
“Let it be what it is,” Dr. Emerson might say. “At least you’re painting.”
She needed to create space for doing it more often, especially when she felt stressed. Art had always helped her to be well—not only her own art but also Vincent’s art. As a child she had fallen in love with his paintings and for years had studied and savored the honest poetry of his letters. She’d even written her college honors thesis on the potent spirituality of his art and the chiaroscuro of his sorrowing, rejoicing life, the shadows of despair streaked by what he called “a ray from on high.” In his letters, in his sketches, in his paintings—even in the darker ones—beamed the hint of radiant hope.
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget . . .
She wished she could see and forget. She set down her palette knife and brushed a strand of her short, dark hair away from her eyes. She envied those who could see and forget. But that had never been, and likely never would be, her gift. Social workers, artists, caregivers, people of faith and compassion—theirs was the call to see and not flinch.
She rinsed off her brushes in the sink and pinched the bristles to dislodge remnants of dark sky. Maybe she would have the kids paint rather than draw today. She could analyze their use of color, study their subject matter for indicators of trauma, and note her observations in their case files.
She rubbed her tinted hands with lukewarm water and glanced over her shoulder at her work. What would someone conclude about her if they saw it? What might Dr. Emerson note in his file? She turned off the faucet, went back to her palette, and dipped her broadest brush in gray. Then she smeared paint over the entire canvas, erasing every bit of evidence.
She didn’t have margin for melancholy. The children needed her to be strong. The women needed her to be hopeful. She could pull herself together and be resilient. She had done it many times before, and she could do it again. In the midst of all the chaos and churn, she could cling like Vincent’s roots. And press on.
1
October
Time for your medicine, Wren.” Kelly, one of the kinder nurses, entered the room with a little plastic cup of pills and a glass of water.
Wren set her pencil down on the bed. She had been so immersed in drawing she hadn’t heard the summons to the nurses’ station for morning medications. Kelly, thankfully, wasn’t one to scold.
“That’s really good,” Kelly said, studying the sketch of a woman carrying a bucket. “I didn’t know you’re an artist.”
“Just an amateur.”
“Well, I can’t even do stick figures.” Kelly handed her the cup. “I’m glad you’re drawing.”
There wasn’t much else to do. Sleep, sketch, attend groups. Now that the immobilizing lethargy had lifted and the racing, terrifying thoughts had begun to quiet, her creative impulses stirred again. She swallowed her pills dutifully.
“The others just went down to breakfast,” Kelly said. “I’d bring you a tray, but Dominic wouldn’t like it.”
No, he wouldn’t. Her new case manager had given strict instructions about the importance of engaging with community as much as possible. “I’ll be right there.”
“I’ll walk you down. Come find me at the nurses’ station when you’re ready.”
She waited for Kelly to exit the room then returned to her sketch. If she couldn’t expunge the image of the whales and the rescue mission, even all these months after first reading the news story, then she needed to work with it.
That’s what Dr. Emerson had recommended during their last appointment together, just before he retired in June: be open to what the image might want to reveal. And get on the schedule with one of his colleagues. But she had never bothered to make an appointment with another therapist. She was tired of change, and it required way too much energy to start over again with someone new. If she could even find a good match. That was always a challenge. And then if you found someone good, they might move away. Or take a maternity leave and not return. Or not take your new insurance. Or retire.
She shaded the woman’s hair with the edge of her pencil. Maybe it wasn’t a rescue mission. Maybe the woman was carrying a bucket to make a sandcastle with a child, like the red plastic ones she and her mother carried years ago whenever they walked the Australian coastline near her childhood home, looking for shells. The purple ones were their favorite.
But her grandfather always warned her that blue-ringed octopuses lurked in the tide pools, concealing themselves in shells or beneath rocks. She had to be vigilant because with one bite they could paralyze a girl and knock her unconscious and make her unable to breathe. Pop knew a girl who—
She needed to breathe.
—was looking for starfish with her grandfather when—
Breathe.
She placed one hand on her chest, the other below her rib cage, and inhaled slowly through her nose to allow her diaphragm to fill, just as a therapist had taught her years ago. She tightened her stomach muscles as she exhaled through pursed lips. Keep the chest still, very still. Once. Twice. A third time. There. Settled.
See? You’re fine. Just keep breathing, nice and slow.
After her morning group she would draw a relaxing day along the shores of nearby Lake Michigan, where no whales could beach themselves, where no venomous octopuses lurked in shadows, and where children could skip and play and build castles to their hearts’ content, happy and carefree children, not terrified or traumatized or abused like the ones who came to Bethel House, but laughing and splashing, innocent and protected and safe.
She tucked her notebook inside her pillowcase so her current roommate wouldn’t find it as the last one had. Then she fastened her shoes with a plastic grip that had replaced her confiscated shoelaces and shuffled toward the nurses’ station.
As Kelly escorted her to the dining hall, it was impossible not to overhear an anguished groan and cry of protest from behind a closed door, the same groan and cry of protest that had run on a continual loop in her own head the past few days: I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here. Please help me.
For the last several months she had convinced herself that with more than ten years of therapy and six different therapists behind her—not to mention her training as a social worker—she had collected all the tools she needed for fighting the good fight whenever her nemesis reappeared. But she was mistaken. She’d also been naively hopeful, thinking she could wean herself off her medications without talking to her doctor. Some would say it was her fault, not being proactive about pursuing care when she needed it. But she thought she could manage on her own.
And she had, at least for a while. She’d made it almost four months without Dr. Emerson and eight without Casey. Some might say she deserved a bit of credit for lasting that long without breaking, especially with the ongoing strain at work. All the whales. Too many mama and baby whales.
Scattered along the hallways at Glenwood Psychiatric Hospital and on countless remote beaches lay God-only-knew how many helpless ones sighing and moaning, dazed and disoriented, hoping for a mission of mercy, a cup of cold water, a rescue from destruction, a resurrection from death.
For the past three years she had been one of the rescuers. Now at twenty-seven she was one of the stranded ones, weary of fighting against the rip currents of fear, despair, and the sensitivity that could morph from gift to crippling liability without any warning. If others knew the mental battle required just to keep from disintegrating under the daily burden of sorrow and stress, maybe they wouldn’t be surprised she had landed at Glenwood. They might even be compassionate. But she hadn’t told them. Her friends and fellow social workers thought she was on a much-needed vacation.
She would have told Casey the truth, and he would have understood. He had needed rescuing himself. Many times. She had often been the one to help lead him to safety. But no more. That was his wife’s job now. She hoped Brooke would be vigilant.
She spooned firm scrambled eggs onto her plate, poured a small cup of orange juice, and sat in the corner with her back turned toward the other patients gathered at rectangular tables near the center of the room. Chewing slowly, she stared at the framed art, no doubt designed to compensate for the cheerlessness of artificial light and window views of a brick wall. She wondered if those who chose the prints understood the significance of selecting Van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises and wheat fields and gardens to decorate a mental hospital. Maybe they didn’t know he had painted some of them during his own stay in an asylum. Maybe they selected the paintings without giving thought to the context of his work, how he accessed his pain and channeled his suffering into the creation of something shimmering and transcendent, capturing the sacred in the swirling light of stars or in the weathered face and weary posture of a peasant laborer.
However the art came to be on the walls, Wren was grateful for the presence of beauty in the midst of desolation. Here, in a place where she hadn’t touched a blade of grass or a tree in five days, Vincent could be her eyes to the radiance of the natural world, reminding her there were places where her soul could breathe, like in the walled courtyard where she was permitted to sit twice daily and where a patch of blue or gray sky above the concrete walls was a little square of infinity that beckoned her and gave her hope that someday she might be free of the oppressive darkness pinning her down like a boulder on a dragonfly.
Vincent, at least, had been permitted to take supervised walks around the picturesque grounds of the asylum and paint outdoors when he was well enough. She wondered who had determined that patients in a mental hospital like Glenwood would benefit more from austerity and scarcity than from beauty and abundance. If only there were a garden to sit in with green and growing things to tend to. If only there were flowers or birds or a pond. Something alive and enlivening.
She set down her plastic spork, its tines blunt and harmless, and stared at Vincent’s golden wheat fields under a whirling sky, the vast blue calling to mind the Australian sky she had loved as a child. That was a scene where she could travel in her memory and imagination—to her grandparents’ house, where she and her mother lived until she was ten, a house that kept evolving, growing new chambers like a nautilus as Pop added on a veranda here, a bedroom there. He’d built it on land he’d cleared in the bush, the eucalyptus trees dense around the paddock where the horses grazed. She pictured herself there, a little girl reading under the willow trees that rimmed the pond. She watched Pop carve bristly banksia pods into wooden balls and bells to adorn Christmas trees. She lay beneath the Southern Cross, scanning for shooting stars to wish upon. There she was, happy and at peace.
But inevitably the shadows would descend, tainting the picture of joy and contentment. The relentless, ominous dark would press in as it had for Vincent, the storm clouds gathering, the crows hovering, the destroyer lurking at noonday and breathing menacing threats, always prowling, always encroaching, always obscuring the halo light of the sun. She hadn’t had words for the darkness then. Later, she would learn them. Depression. Anxiety.
“Groups are starting,” a voice called from the doorway. Though the multiple daily groups were not mandatory, attendance was necessary to demonstrate progress to the case workers. She hadn’t missed one yet.
With a final glance at Vincent’s skies, she scraped the rest of her eggs into the trash, poured out her juice, and followed the other patients down the hall.
“Wren? What kind of a name is Wren?”
Every single day, the same exact question from the woman who rocked constantly in her seat, wringing her hands.
“Leave her alone, Sylvia,” the man beside her muttered. “It’s a good name.”
“It’s a bird name. The name of a bird. Like a little birdie. She’s a little tweety bird. Tweet tweet.”
Wren stared at the floor, trying to summon pity and patience while she waited for Krystal, the social worker, to take control. At Bethel House she had led many groups like this one, with adult outpatient clients and temporary residents who arrived troubled and traumatized, some of them battling demons of addictions as well as the anguish of domestic violence, some a danger to themselves and, on the rare occasion, to others.
She didn’t belong here. They had promised her at the intake exam that it would require only a few days to get her mood stabilized with medication, and she could gain some new coping strategies for stress. Then she would be free to go. She was exhausted, she told them, mentally and physically and emotionally and spiritually exhausted, and all she wanted was a brief respite from her life, a place where she didn’t have a cell phone, where people didn’t constantly bombard her with their needs and their heartaches, where she wasn’t continually assaulted by chaos and tragedy on every street corner around the globe.
“Tweet tweet, little bird.”
Wren rubbed the side of her nose.
“Little bird, tweet tweet.” Sylvia laughed, long and hard. “Did you see a puddy tat? Get it? Get it, Tweety Bird?”
Stop, Wren silently commanded. Stop it.
Sylvia leaned forward so her face nearly touched Wren’s, her breath thick and sour. “Tweeeeeeet! Tweeeeeeet!”
Wren jumped to her feet, hands clenched, nostrils flared. Someone grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms behind her back. She struggled to free herself but couldn’t twist out of the vise grip. Tweet! Tweeet! The taunting shriek pierced and sliced through her like a serrated blade, and she dropped to her knees, pleading, shouting for all of it, all of it, to stop.
An hour later, Dominic appeared in her doorway with his clipboard. “Okay to talk a minute?” he asked, then entered without waiting for an answer. He hooked the desk chair with his sneaker and dragged it closer to the bed.
Wren pulled her knees to her chest and lowered her gray sweatshirt hood like a monk’s cowl over her head, her fingers in search of the drawstring, a lifeline to tug, an umbilical cord to ground her. But the string had been confiscated along with the shoelaces. “I wasn’t going to hit her.” Her thin voice sounded as if it had arisen from a much younger version of herself.
He scribbled something without looking at her. “Dr. Browerly is going to want to see you when he gets in after lunch.”
She knew what that visit would be about: Was she noticing an increased fluctuation in mood swings? Aggressive thoughts? Did she have a history of assaultive behavior? She knew the checklists.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said, realizing too late that this would be noted in her file, with yet another medication prescribed. How could she sleep with the flashlight safety checks every fifteen minutes, a roommate who snored, and the nocturnal wanderings of a patient from down the hall who sometimes slipped past the nurses’ station without being seen and stood in her doorway, silent and staring? What hope did she have of making progress with her anxiety when everything fed her sense of helplessness and vulnerability?
She wanted a rest. She wanted to sleep and sleep and not wake up. “Please don’t send me back to South Hall.” South Hall was where the severely mentally ill were kept. Wren had spent three hellish days there, not because her presenting symptoms warranted such a placement but because that was the only bed available. “Please, Dominic.” Her South Hall roommate had brandished dark stitches on fresh wounds up and down her arms and would sometimes scream with night terrors. Daily, Wren had begged to be moved to North Hall and daily was told, “Probably tomorrow.”
She stared at her wristband. That was her name and birthdate printed on it. But this was not her life. This couldn’t be her life.
“Krystal indicated to me that you were provoked by someone else in the group, that your reaction seemed to be a post-trau—”
“No.” She knew all about post-traumatic stress disorder. She didn’t have it. Though she might develop a good case of it if they sent her back to South Hall. “I’m tired. That’s all.” Not crazy, she added silently.
He looked up at her. “Were you hurt when the other patient restrained you?”
“No, not bad. I mean, no.” She had insisted to herself and others that she wouldn’t have struck Sylvia, that she would have maintained control, that she had only leapt from her chair because she wanted to escape the taunting and flee the group. But maybe the other patient had saved her from doing what she didn’t think she was capable of doing. She didn’t know what she was capable of anymore, she was so tired. “Please don’t send me back to South Hall. I just want to sleep.”
Dominic scribbled a few more notes, then rose from the chair. “Everyone else is in groups right now. Maybe you can get some rest before lunch.”
She waited until he left the room, then rolled onto her side, determined not to cry. Because if she started to cry, she wasn’t sure she could stop.
“Dominic said I could bring you lunch.”
Wren pushed back her hood and scooched herself up in bed.
Kelly handed her a tray with chicken salad, a cup of melon, and a whole grain roll, then sat on the edge of the mattress. “How are you feeling? Looks like you slept for a while.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I guess I did.” She glanced across at her roommate’s empty bed, the sheets rumpled. The two of them hadn’t had much conversation. The more normal someone appeared, the less likely they seemed willing to disclose the reasons for being there. “If I could get a few good nights of sleep, I think I’d feel a lot better.”
“It’s hard for that here, I know.”
If she had known how difficult it would be, she might not have come. But her reliable coping strategies had stopped working. And she was scared. She didn’t know what she was capable of, she was so tired. Your fault, the voice inside her head reminded her. If you hadn’t stopped going to counseling and taking your medications . . .
She hated the thought of needing drugs in order to manage her life.
Only Casey and her parents knew about the cocktail of antidepressants and anxiety medications she had started taking in high school. Casey had been on his own cocktail for bipolar disorder. Whatever stigma was attached to mental illness, they’d shared it together. It had eased the burden. And complicated it.
“Dr. Browerly wants to meet with you before your next group,” Kelly said. “And I thought maybe you’d like to have a bit of time in the courtyard after you finish eating. It’s nice outside. Cool, but sunny.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Clouds, rain, hail, it wouldn’t matter. A bit of fresh autumn air and a place to breathe without music videos or news blaring from the television in the common room across the hall would be a gift. If she had ever needed to be recalibrated with a sense of gratitude for small things, then confinement at Glenwood had already accomplished that.
Periwinkle. Cornflower. Aquamarine. Turquoise. Azure. Cerulean. Blue, oh, the wonder and glory of blue! She leaned her head back and looked up, the white clouds brushed in thick impasto strokes like Vincent’s churning skies. She shut her left eye and traced two fingers along the brow of a cloud, imagining the feel of her palette knife as she mixed and molded white with violet and a bit of citron yellow, spreading the paint like icing on a layer cake. Sweep, swish, swirl. There were no palette knives or oils or canvases in the art room at Glenwood, only watercolors and soft brushes and sheets of white computer paper. But at least there was paint. For the first time in months, she felt a desire to return to an easel and create something beautiful. That, her case manager would probably say, was progress.
“Hear that?” a voice from behind her asked. She turned to face a gray-haired man who was pointing toward the sky. “Wait for it,” he whispered. “Wait for it . . . there! There! Did you hear it?”
Wren heard only the sound of a light wind rustling through unseen trees that had by now, she imagined, become flaming torches of amber, vermilion, and copper. “No. Sorry. I don’t think so.”
“Listen. You got to listen. Close your eyes.”
Unsure how safe that was when she was in a confined space with other patients, she squinted.
“Listen for it now, okay? Like a cough. Churt-churt. Churt-churt-churt.”
And then, just as he’d described it, the call sounded. She opened her eyes. “Yes! I heard it that time.”
He nodded his approval. “Red-bellied woodpecker. They’ve got a different call this time of year. Usually, it’s kwirr kwirr.” He closed his eyes. “Cardinal. Blue jay. Chickadee. Woodpecker again.” While she’d been reveling in clouds, he’d been reveling in birdcalls. “Know the most important tool for birding?”
Wren thought a moment. “Binoculars?”
He made the sound of a buzzer. “Your ears! That’s how you know what’s around. Even if you can’t see them, you can hear them. You have to know how to listen.”
She hoped he wouldn’t ask her name. She didn’t want to reveal that a woman named after a bird knew so little about them.
“Michigan,” he said. “This is a good place to be, right on the migration path. You get them coming and going.” He scanned the patch of sky. “They’ll be going soon, some of them, anyway. Heading south once the weather turns. You seen the way the geese fly in those Vs, how they take turns being the leaders?”
Wren nodded.
“Know why one side of the V is longer than the other?”
“No.”
“’Cause there’s more birds on that side.” He laughed, then signaled to a staff member that he was ready to go back indoors.
Wren sat down on a bench, eyes still fixed on the patch of blue, ears now tuned for a variety of songs she couldn’t identify. Her mother probably knew some of the calls. She loved birds. She loved telling the story of how a bird had saved her. Or rather, how God had saved her by sending one.
Maybe she’d call and ask her mother to tell her the story again, to remind her she wasn’t alone, that God was with her. Despite how it seemed.
2
Oh, her sweet little bird.
Jamie Crawford gripped her phone to her chest and leaned against the bannister. It took every ounce of strength not to hop on the next plane from North Carolina to Michigan and wrap her oldest daughter in her arms. But Wren had again insisted this was a journey she needed to make on her own. She didn’t want her family seeing her like this. Not here, Mom. Not now. Maybe after they send me home.
“Are you all right, Mommy?” Five-year-old Phoebe, her surprise baby at forty-two, had stopped coloring at the table and was staring at her, brow furrowed. Even speaking in code from the adjacent room hadn’t been enough to conceal heartache and worry.
“Fine, love.” Jamie set her phone down on the kitchen counter and pulled up a chair. “Tell me about your pretty picture.”
“I’m making a card for Wren.”
“Are you?” Nothing got past that child.
“Since she’s sad.”
“That’s so thoughtful, Phoebe. I know she’ll love getting a card from you.”
Phoebe scrunched her nose in concentration as she peered into her box of colors. “She’s so sad because her friend moved away.”
Jamie reached for a blank piece of paper from the stack in front of Phoebe. She would need to be more careful what she communicated to Dylan when the kids were around. “Well, I’m sure your pretty rainbow will make her very happy.”
“And I’m drawing a fairy. Like the one that landed on your tummy.”
Jamie removed a royal blue crayon from the box. “Phoebe, when Mommy’s on the phone, sometimes it’s to talk about grown-up things you don’t need to worry about, okay?”
“I know. Daddy tells me that all the time.”
Much as Jamie would have liked to change the subject entirely and let the fairy misunderstanding drop, if she didn’t correct her, Phoebe would likely wander around Fellowship Hall on Sunday morning telling people about the fairy that God sent her mommy when Wren was in her tummy.
Jamie sketched the outline of a bird before coloring its plump little body and upright tail. “It wasn’t a fairy that landed on Mommy’s lap. It was a bird called a fairywren, a tiny little bird that’s bright, bright blue like this, see?”
Phoebe pressed her hands to the table and leaned forward. “That doesn’t look like a bird.”
“No, I’m not a good artist like you or Wren. But this is like the little bird that landed on my lap one day when I was praying. They have lots of these birds in Australia. I’ll show you a picture of a real one later.”
Phoebe lowered her head and sighed dramatically. “I’m just so sad.”
Dylan entered the kitchen, holding his favorite sermon-writing mug. “Why’s my girl so sad?”
“Because I’ll never ever get to see a real fairy bird or koala.”
He cast Jamie a Where did that come from? look.
Jamie mimed “big ears” and “Wren.”
He patted Phoebe on the head. “Maybe when you’re older we’ll all take a trip to Australia, and you can see where your mommy was born and where I first saw her and fell in love with her. And you’ll get to see lots of wallabies and kangaroos and koalas.”
“And cassowaries that will rip your guts out,” twelve-year-old Joel called from the family room.
“Ewwwwww!” Phoebe exclaimed.
“Not on my watch,” Dylan said. “Nothing’s going to hurt my girl.”
Joel appeared in the doorway, holding his science book, headphones draped around his neck. “You think they’re cute, but koalas will rip your face off.”
Dylan held up his hand. “Joel, that’s enough.”
“Just saying.”
“Enough.”
Without another word Joel slunk back to the couch.
“Phoebe, put your crayons away for now and go upstairs to play, okay? I need to talk to Mommy.”
“But I want—”
“Now. Please.”
“We’ll finish our coloring later,” Jamie said. “And here, I’ll put your rainbow on the fridge, so we can all enjoy it before we send it to your sister.”
“I need to draw the fairy.”
“Okay, take it with you. But color on your desk, not your bed, okay?”
“You too, Joel,” Dylan said. “Upstairs for a while. Let me talk to Mom in private.”
They waited until they heard two bedroom doors close upstairs, one more angrily than the other. “She hates missing out on conversations,” Jamie said.
“And I hate her eavesdropping. We’re going to have to start having all our important conversations in my office or something. Either that, or tell the church we’re done living in this old manse and find a house that’s big enough.” Dylan had been making that threat ever since Olivia, now sixteen, was in elementary school. The house hadn’t been designed with a growing family in mind. But the view over the valley was priceless, especially when fireflies winked like a thousand sparkling lights, or when hot-air balloons rose from the valley floor to float over bronze and scarlet trees, or when morning mist hung like a gauzy veil on the evergreens. Wren loved the view as much as Jamie did. She often painted it during her visits.
Dylan emptied his mug into the sink. “So, fill me in. What’s the latest?”
“She still doesn’t want me to come.”
“I know she says that, but . . .”
“She says it will be too upsetting for me.” No matter how hard Jamie had tried to convince her otherwise, Wren was unpersuaded. “I told her it’s not about me, that it’s about her, about loving and supporting her. And she says this is how I can best do that, by staying away. I want to honor her wishes, but . . .”
“Has Kit been there?”
“She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“I’ll call her and see if she’ll go visit.”
Jamie shook her head slowly. “No. Wait.” Even though Kit, Dylan’s favorite aunt, would be a prayerful, compassionate presence, Wren hadn’t given permission to share any details about her hospitalization. “I feel like we’d be betraying her, especially if she hasn’t told anyone where she is.”
“But Kit’s got experience with these kinds of things. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing she was there?”
“Of course I would, but . . .”
He picked up his phone. “Blame it on me. We’re calling her.”
No, Kit said, she hadn’t heard from her. She’d last seen her at Kingsbury’s art festival, where Wren had exhibited one of her paintings in the corridor of a downtown restaurant. “Her seascape was gorgeous,” she told Jamie, “but very dark. I’m no painter, but it felt turbulent. There were a lot of people around, though, and I didn’t have a chance to talk with her about it. I wish now that I’d followed up with her. I’m so sorry.”
Jamie had seen a photo of Wren’s entry, the tumbling waves and stormy skies thick with Van Gogh-esque brushstrokes but lacking her usual vibrancy of color. Though Wren had insisted it was a good experience to exhibit in the public vote competition, she had also intimated how vulnerable she’d felt sitting next to her work while people feigned interest or passed judgment on it with an averted gaze or a perfunctory compliment. Jamie regretted not flying out for the event. But Olivia had been preparing for her driver’s exam, and Phoebe had been sick with strep, and Dylan had been away at a ministry conference, and Joel—there had been something happening with Joel too, but now she couldn’t remember what it was.
“I’d love to visit her,” Kit was saying, “if she’ll put me on her list.”
A science fair. Joel had had a big project due for a science fair, and with Dylan out of town . . .
“Do you want to check with her and see?” Kit asked. “I know the visiting hours are usually pretty limited, but I’d be happy to rearrange my schedule and get there whenever it’s open for her.”
“I’ll call her,” Jamie said. “But honestly, she probably won’t be happy we told you. Nothing against you, I mean . . .”
“No, I understand. These things are so hard. And the feeling of shame makes it worse. Poor girl.” She paused. “I’m so glad you let me know. At least I can be praying. Is there anything else I can do?”
Jamie couldn’t think of anything, so she thanked her, told her she’d keep her updated, and handed the phone back to Dylan.
How many hours had she spent over the years trying to make sense of Wren’s depression, trying to identify some root cause, some inciting event, some maternal failure or oversight that would lead a beloved daughter to question whether she could live the life she’d been given? Would it have been easier to accept her daughter’s illness if she’d been able to explain it? Even if she could have explained it or understood it, that didn’t mean she could control or prevent it. Though, God knows, she’d tried.
And what about this latest round? For years Wren had insisted she didn’t need to be hospitalized, that she could press through her struggles with depression and anxiety with the help of counseling and medication. It hadn’t been easy, but she had managed. Even with the stress of being a social worker—a career choice Jamie had always worried would crush her—Wren had managed and had even, at times, thrived. Helping others gave her a sense of purpose.
She’s sad because her friend moved away, Phoebe had observed.
No doubt about it, Casey’s sudden move and marriage had hit Wren hard, not because there had ever been any romantic attachment between them, but because they had been like siblings. After sharing so much of life together, it was understandable that Wren should grieve his absence. But was that enough to explain her descent into severe melancholy and paralyzing anxiety?
Then again, Jamie reminded herself, who was she to stand in judgment over someone else’s sorrow?
If Wren knew what had precipitated her latest decline, she hadn’t shared that information with her family. She’d only said she was too tired to fight against the darkness and needed radical intervention. She was frightened, she said, frightened enough to seek admission to a psychiatric hospital.
Jamie stared out the window at streaks of clouds twining above the valley like tendrils.
Her daughter was in a psychiatric hospital. Her daughter was suffering from mental illness. There was nothing she could do to fix it, nothing she could do to alleviate the pain, nothing she could do.
You can pray, some would reply. You can trust God.
She did. But that didn’t mean he would fix it, either.
3
No matter how old she got, Wren never tired of hearing the narrative of what her mother called her “holy visitation.”
She propped a pillow behind her, opened her notebook, and sketched the outline of her winged namesake.
When she was small, Wren would sit cross-legged in the pasture and hope one of the little fairywrens flitting between the shrubs surrounding the paddock would decide she was a very good girl and come sit on her lap too. But her stillness never persuaded them, which made what happened to her mother seem all the more magical and mysterious.
She shaded the tail with her pencil edge.
One of her favorite childhood nighttime rituals had been curling up with her mother beneath the attic bedroom skylight, the two of them tucked beneath her grandmother’s quilt, her mother’s voice lilting and lovely, soothing fears and anxieties by assuring Wren that she was safe, that God watched over her, that God himself had knit her together—not with long needles like Gran’s, but with love. Wren hadn’t understood what it looked like for God to knit with love, but she had a sense that she was special and chosen, that she was known and seen, even before she was born.
“But what did the bird do after it hopped into your lap?” she would ask.
Her mother would reply, “It looked at me as if to say, ‘I’ve been sent to deliver a message from God.’”
“What message?”
“‘Don’t be afraid.’”
So Wren would lean her head against her pillow and try very hard not to be afraid. Because if God had said, “Don’t be afraid,” then she shouldn’t be afraid. Not of anything.
But she was still glad Pop carried his snake stick whenever they walked the bush together. Because an eastern brown snake had struck and killed one of the dogs before Wren was born—Pop had told her the story so she would be very careful and watch for them in the garden—and she worried that Tangara, her favorite sheepdog, would someday be bitten and killed too. They were fast and aggressive, the eastern browns, and Pop said they had a bad temper, that they could rear up like a stallion and strike with venom powerful enough to paralyze a small girl. And her mother would motion for him to stop telling her such things, but he would say, “She needs to know so she can be prepared.”
So, whenever her mother’s head disappeared beneath the trap door as she descended the ladder with a final, “I love you! Sleep tight!” Wren would barricade herself behind a wall of stuffed toys, burrow beneath the covers, and try to spot the Southern Cross through the skylight, because if she could see it, she knew God could see her.
She shoved her notebook under the blanket just as her roommate entered. Maybe after Monica fell asleep, she would sketch a pregnant woman with a bird on her lap. She wished she had brought her tin of graphite pencils, but those would probably have been confiscated along with the shoelaces and drawstring. She ought to be grateful she was allowed to keep a single pencil. Poor Vincent van Gogh, he’d had his pen confiscated at the asylum. His materials, too, after he swallowed oil paint and turpentine during one of his attacks. He suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, his doctors said, with terrible seizures and hallucinations that terrified him and could last for weeks. Poor tormented Vincent, wounded and stranded and frightened, longing for a cup of comfort, for rescue, for peace.
Wren cleared her throat and said hello when she noticed Monica staring at her.
Monica mumbled hello. Then she shuffled toward her bed, removed her pajamas from beneath her pillow, and disappeared behind the bathroom curtain to change her clothes.
Wren hoped she would be able to sleep without being awakened every half hour by Monica’s snoring, even with the in-ear headphones Kelly had supplied. She ought to feel compassion for a fellow sufferer—whatever her suffering was—but instead she felt only desperate exhaustion.
That’s how she had framed her struggle to her mother when she called a second time: yes, she’d been having frequent panic attacks and was feeling depressed, but she knew if she could get some sleep, and if they could get the medications regulated again, she would be okay. And no, it wasn’t necessary for Kit to come during visitor hours. She just wanted to focus on attending her groups and trying to get well enough to go home. In the morning she would submit her written request for discharge, and then she would be kept a maximum of three more days, which, she’d assured her mother, was more than enough time. Especially when the cure sometimes felt as hard as the affliction.
Mental illness.
She suffered from “mental illness.” She had tried to come to grips with that label when she was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression in high school. “There’s no shame in this,” the doctor had said, handing her the first of many prescriptions. “If you were diabetic, you would need insulin.”
But that logic seemed lost on some Christians she’d met who, though it never would have occurred to them to judge a diabetic for taking medication, insisted that the depressed and anxious should be able to “pray their way out of it” or “memorize more Scripture” and be cured. That’s what one small group leader had told her when she confided during her junior year of college that she was struggling to cope. “Anxiety and depression are all about a lack of faith,” the leader said. If she would just repent and trust Jesus, she would be fine.
“And you wonder why I don’t go to church?” Casey had said when she told him. Then he ranted about Job’s comforters being alive and well, spouting their pious platitudes to those who sat in dust and ashes. Wren regretted telling him. He didn’t need more fuel for his resentment about church.
Shortly after that she stopped attending the small group and changed churches. She also decided she wouldn’t speak again about her affliction to anyone except Casey, her parents, and her counselor. She couldn’t risk further reproach. If she could have “believed Jesus” for a way out of the darkness, she would have. For years she’d tried. But being told her anxiety and depression were rooted in sin or lack of faith or spiritual warfare only made her more anxious and depressed.
The curtain swished along the metal rod, and Monica emerged in striped flannel pajamas, clutching her jeans and sweatshirt like a life preserver to her chest.
“Your socks,” Wren said, pointing. “You dropped your—”
“Oh. Thanks.” When she stooped to pick them up, she nearly lost her balance.
“Are you okay?”
Monica looked up, mouth twisted in a wry frown. “Are any of us?”
Unsure if this was an opening for conversation—unsure if she wanted an opening for conversation—Wren tried to squeeze the tip of her pinkie finger through the hole where the sweatshirt drawstring belonged.
“All of this”—Monica swirled her hand in front of her face—“all the masks, all the ‘I’m fine, everything’s fine, it’s all good,’ it all comes off whether we want it to or not. It comes off in a place like this. And they say I’m brave. Brave for what? For leaving my kids with my mother so I can take a break from being one? That makes me brave? It makes me sick.” This last word she spit with disgust. “And as for the psychiatrist, Breyer, Bauer—”
“Browerly?”
“Yeah, Browerly. What a waste of space he is, sitting there at his computer, not even looking at you while he types away. It’s all so . . . so . . .”
Wren waited for her to find the word.
“Dehumanizing. A number, I’m a number. His ‘two-fifteen’ or ‘ten-thirty’ or ‘one-forty-five.’ I’m an appointment, that’s all.” She kicked off her slippers. “Just part of another billable hour so he can have his cottage at the lake or take his cruise or whatever.”
Wren cleared her throat again. “Kelly’s nice.”
“Yeah, Kelly’s fine. But Kelly isn’t the one making the decisions about me being here, Browerly is. And when you actually want to see him, that’s when he avoids you. Have you noticed that? How if you want to see him about getting out or if you have a complaint about something, he’s”—she signed air quotes—“‘unavailable’? Have you noticed that?”
She had. But Dr. McKendrick, the other psychiatrist everyone seemed to prefer, was full. She had asked.
“All a big racket, the whole thing,” Monica said. “I never should have agreed to come here. And what do they say, that ninety percent of us will end up back here? No, not me.” Her eyes lit with fierce determination as she flung back the blanket and crawled into bed. “Not me.”
No, Wren thought. Not me, either. Please, no.
She drew her knees tightly to her chest and waited until she heard Monica’s breathing settle into an uneasy rhythm of sleep before she removed her own pajamas from beneath her pillow and tiptoed toward the bathroom curtain, making sure to pull it quietly behind her. Not me. Not a statistic. She would prove the statistics wrong. She wriggled her right arm out of her sleeve and pulled the sweatshirt upward. Now, breathe. She lingered, face covered in the dark shroud, and focused on filling her diaphragm.
Dr. Browerly hadn’t looked her in the eye the entire fifteen minutes she’d sat in front of his vast, untidy desk that afternoon. A small, anxious child summoned to the principal’s office for interrogation, she hadn’t bothered to correct him when he called her by the wrong name. No, sir, she didn’t think she had a problem with anger. No, sir, she hadn’t experienced a sense of rage like that before. He changed the dosage of one of the medications and sent her away.
Breathe.
She couldn’t remember how to breathe.
She tried to yank the sweatshirt off, but her left arm felt like dead weight, and she was pinned, flailing, her throat constricting.
Breathe!
She couldn’t swallow. She was choking.
Help!
No words, no breath. Her heart was pounding. Her chest was going to explode. She could feel her throbbing pulse in her ears. She was going to die. She ripped off the sweatshirt, then her T-shirt, leaving her torso bare, shivering, sweating. This time she was going to die. She was floating, swirling. She lowered herself onto the cold tile floor and surrendered to the consuming dark.
No. No sedative. She didn’t want any more medications. These panic attacks, they came in relentless waves, and sometimes she didn’t know what triggered them. Those were the particularly terrifying ones, the attacks that ambushed without apparent cause or correlation. “Let me take a shower,” she said to Bree, the night shift worker who’d found her huddled and hyperventilating behind the curtain on one of the fifteen-minute checks. “That will help relax me.”
Monica, who had been awakened by the commotion, turned over in her bed, sighed loudly, and pulled the covers over her face.
“I’m sorry,” Wren said. And then silently added, But you’ve kept me up plenty of times. She wrapped her sweatshirt more tightly around herself and lowered her voice. “Please, Bree.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to see a nurse?”
She wasn’t sure about much of anything right now, except that she didn’t want to lose any more control. “Just a shower. Please.”
Bree hesitated, then said, “Okay. You’ll need to press the button—”
“I know.” She wasn’t a newbie, and she hadn’t forgotten the drill: press the button on the wall every thirty seconds to keep the water flowing so the staff knew you were still alive.
A few minutes later she stood beneath a spray of water, hand poised beside the button and tears streaming down her cheeks. My God, my God, she murmured. Why?
4
You’ve got to fly out there,” Dylan told Jamie as he straightened his tie. “If she won’t let Kit come visit her, then you need to go.”
Jamie ran the lint roller over the back of his suit coat, meeting his gaze in their mirrored closet door.
“The kids and I will be fine,” he said. “Olivia can help around here, and we can recruit some people to help out in the office.” Ever since the longtime church secretary retired, Jamie had been volunteering several days a week.
“That’s not the issue,” she said. “Wren still insists she needs to face this on her own.” Dylan shrugged slightly. “Yeah, but she needs some support, even if she says she doesn’t.”
“But what would we tell the congregation? She won’t want any of this public.”
“No, I know. Sad, isn’t it? If she’d been hospitalized with gallstones or appendicitis or something, we would’ve put it on the prayer chain.”
“Put what on a chain?” Phoebe chirped from the doorway.
“Nothing, Phoebe. Let me talk to Daddy, okay?”
“C’mon, Feebs,” Olivia said, grabbing her hand with a knowing glance at her mother. She had obviously been eavesdropping too. “You need to get dressed for church.”
“Mommy needs to pick out my clothes.”
“I’ll help you today.”
“Thanks, Liv,” Jamie said. Olivia nodded and closed the bedroom door.
“See?” Dylan said, tugging on his collar. “We’ll be fine. And if anyone asks, I’ll say Wren has been under some stress lately and wants time with her mom. End of story. People know she has a stressful job. They won’t ask questions.”
He was probably right. “Stress” was a far more socially acceptable label than “nervous breakdown.” People were generally sympathetic and understanding about stress.
She tore off the lint-covered sticky tape and crumpled it. If only she had caught on to some of the warning signs earlier. If only she had asked more questions, been more attentive, more proactive. If only, if only, if only. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call the hospital.”
It was late afternoon before Wren returned her call, her voice thin and tired. “You know I’d love to see you, Mom, but now’s not a good time.”
Jamie closed the bedroom door and sat down on the edge of her bed. “But I hate the thought of you going through all this alone.”
“Even if you came, visiting hours are only twice a week. And I’m really hoping I’ll only be here a few more days.”
“Did you submit your request to be released?”
“No. Not after the episode last night. I’ll give it another day, see how the medication adjustment works.”
“Sweetheart, I wish . . .”
“I know. I wish you could make it all better too. But you can’t. No one can.”
