We Are the Light(63)
I’m sure Jill and Isaiah tried to get me out of that place or at least attempted to see me, but I was told that I wasn’t allowed visitors for at least five days and I couldn’t remember anyone’s cell phone numbers, as I had them all programmed into my phone, which had been confiscated when I first arrived. So the anachronistic pay phone on the wall was useless to me.
Daily, I’d meet with social workers and psychologists who asked me a lot of pointless questions like: What were my mental health goals? and How did I plan to pay my bills in the future? and Did I have a reliable support group? and Had I properly mourned my wife’s passing? I thought I had previously known how much I missed you, Karl, but it wasn’t until I got locked up that I truly felt the full weight of my grief.
“I need a Jungian analyst,” I kept telling them. I’d say I wasn’t picky. I didn’t require that they’d studied at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. But I adamantly refused to be treated by a non-Jungian, which I think greatly insulted everyone at this particular facility. At one point, this one social worker—a young woman who looked no older than Eli—rolled her eyes at me. But mostly I just sat in the TV room falling asleep sitting up and drooling all over myself as Sandra Coyle’s head kept popping up on the television screen to outline the dangers of unregulated gun ownership. I kept telling myself that it was okay to sleep—that I was emotionally and psychologically exhausted and that I could try to make friends with the people around me tomorrow, when I’d be more rested.
But then Isaiah and Jill were there saying it was time for me to leave, which I said couldn’t be right because it had only been a day or two at most. But they insisted it had already been three weeks, which I found hard to believe even as I was actually walking out of the building and toward Isaiah’s sedan. I remember noticing that the leaves were changing colors, which frightened me a bit, if only because it seemed to prove that I had lost a significant amount of time. Jill sat with me in the back seat while Isaiah drove, and that’s when I realized I would never make it into the atrium’s magical cube of sunlight and that I wasn’t going to be beamed up into the heavens, which made me feel so low and sad I almost couldn’t stand it, even though it was obviously much better to have been freed by friends.
The next thing I remember is waking up with my head in Jill’s lap and my body curled up in the fetal position on the back seat. Jill was running her fingers through my hair. She and Isaiah were talking in whispers, which made me realize that they thought I was still asleep, so I closed my eyes and pretended to be.
“I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing here,” my best man friend said from behind the wheel.
“Well, we’re not leaving him in that place,” Jill said.
“You won’t be able to restrain him if he has another breakdown.”
“He’s not going to have another breakdown.”
“How do you know?”
I think I might have fallen asleep again here because I don’t remember anything else from that car ride.
Then Jill and Isaiah were helping me out of the sedan and—when I looked around—I was surprised to see my front yard had been completely covered with signs and cards and flowers and stuffed animals. It looked like several hundred people had left personalized messages of support. There was a big banner hanging like a smile on the face of my home. It was white with gold lettering, which made me wonder if it had been Jesus Gomez’s doing, since it matched the Tshirts he had made for everyone. It read: “Majestic’s Got You, Lucas!”
Two weeks later, right before the first of our now weekly Sunday-morning soccer matches—in which I have somewhat miraculously started as our team’s goalie for the better part of four years—Jesus gave me a brand-new pair of white-and-gold goalie gloves. When I thanked him, he said that the gloves were the absolute least he could do for me.
“I’m going to do more, my highly esteemed friend,” he said through a toothy smile. Then he drummed on my chest with his fists, as though my right pec were a boxing speed bag, while adding, “Your objective is easy. Keep the ball out of the net. But don’t worry too much if the bad guys score on you today because we’re going to keep doing this every Sunday forever and ever, and so you and me, Lucas Goodgame, we’re going to get better. You understand?”
When I nodded, he used my left pec for a speed bag. When he had finished pounding my chest, he raised two fists high in the air and yelled, “I love Sunday morning!” as he sprinted to the center of the field for kickoff, because Jesus is our center forward as well as the league’s leading scorer.
But back in my front yard when I first was released from the mental health facility, I wanted to take in every single message, and as I looked around, I began to worry about the amount of thank-you cards I would have to write, thinking I’d need to buy supplies and stamps and figure out everyone’s address, which is when Jill said, “All this love should make you smile, not frown,” so I forced the ends of my mouth to curl upward as we made our way inside.
My home was spotless. The windows had been cleaned. The carpets still had vacuum cleaner marks. And everything smelled like fresh linen and pine. The fridge and freezer had been stocked with dozens of meals, each in a different Tupperware container with a different Majestic surname written across the lid in magic marker. All of The Survivor members’ names were accounted for as well as others. “I had to start turning away food,” Jill said, and I nodded in acknowledgment, because there was literally no more room in the fridge.