Peppermints

“Hello?”

“Hi.” She sounded relieved. “I’m so glad you called.” Gideon could hear a clicking noise in the background; it sounded like she was playing with a pen. He wondered if she was nervous, and then wondered why he wasn’t.

“I need to talk to you, Elle.”

“I missed you, Gideon. Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“Elle, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. About what happened after Mona’s play, about how I took off without telling anyone, and how worried you all were”.

“We were worried, Gideon. But we’re all glad that you’re ok now.”
He sighed deeply, absentmindedly twisting the coiled telephone cord around his left index finger. “Did I ever tell you where I went that night?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“No, you never told any of us. Of course, we’ve all been dying to know, but we...at least I...didn’t want to ask for fear that it would only upset you more.” Gideon could hear the quick little breath that she sucked in after that statement. He knew the question that was hidden in her words, the one that she was too afraid to ask.

“This is going to sound crazy, Elle, but--”

“--It‘s just that--oh! No, I’m sorry, go ahead--”

He paused for a moment, choosing his words. “Elle, do you remember when we were little and Gran would take us to church with her? How she would always shush us and then hand us peppermints to suck on to keep us busy during the sermon?”

“Yeah, I remember that.” She was confused; he could tell.

“Well, that night at Mona’s play I kept thinking about this one time when I went with her. The preacher was talking about the how Jesus would always go off by himself to talk to God, how he sometimes even went up to a mountaintop to pray. And I just kept thinking, man, I should try that. I kept getting this feeling that, if it worked for him, it might work for me. So I did.”

“What? What are you talking about?”. Even though they were both grown now, Elle still managed to make him feel like he was twelve again and she was the incredulous big sister. In some ways, not much had changed.

“Elle, I tried it. What Jesus did, I mean. I walked until I got to Aspen Park, and I found the biggest tree I could, and then…I climbed it, Elle. And it was amazing.” He felt a strange tingling, a sort of quick energy pulse, rush through him at the memory.

“But why? I mean, couldn’t you just have prayed at home by your bed like normal people do?”. As the words came out of her mouth, he wondered if she, Elle, ever prayed that way, by the foot of her bed. He suspected that she did, if she even prayed at all. Prayer seemed a bit too abstract for her tastes.

“It wasn’t so much about the actual prayer, Elle...I mean, I guess it was, but...I don’t know, I just thought that that maybe if I could get alone with God, I could reason with him a little bit, and everything would be--”

“--Is this about Matthew? Is that it, Gideon?”

“I just miss him so much.”

“Oh, God! Gideon, grow up! He was a little boy with a disease. Bad things happen to little kids sometimes. It’s not healthy for you to still be so obsessed with it. It kills Mom and Dad, you know, every time you bring it up.”

“You don’t understand, Elle. He was my brother. Maybe it’s different for you, because you never had paper boat races with him, or played cowboys and Indians, or threw rocks at Mrs. Yamaguchi’s Sharpei.”

“ I can’t believe how immature you are. You don’t think that it hurts me? Well, Gideon, you are wrong. It kills me. But some people realize that life must go on, and that no one is doing Matthew a favor by dwelling on it. It’s been thirteen years, Gideon, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m sorry to be such a disappointment, Elle.” He slowly hung up the phone, and then, as if in a trance, walked into his room and knelt by the bed.