Rapture

Part 1

Uncle Teddy didn’t talk much and he didn’t drink at all anymore, so he tended to fade into the background at family holiday celebrations. This was in contrast to Aunt Loraine, who was a talker, and an enthusiastic consumer of specialty cocktails. These are both family traits. We all love to talk and poke fun at each other, and family gatherings can sometimes get very loud as everyone is trying to be heard. We also make alcohol front and center on these occasions, and we have numerous family recipes for punches, blender drinks, and infused vodka. In the spring, for example, my dad likes to make his special lemon blueberry daiquiris, and we like to drink them to mark the season. In the summer, it’s Cousin Mary’s strawberry mojitos, in the autumn it’s our family whiskey-rum punch recipe that has been passed down for generations, and in December it’s apple martinis with cranberry infused vodka, Aunt Loraine’s own invention.

At holiday parties her martini-fueled conversation always became more and more passionate and her laugh became louder, and she started joke-insulting people and jabbing her manicured fingers at them. On those occasions, Uncle Teddy got more and more silent until you barely noticed he was in the room. On Christmas Eve that year, I literally sat next to him on the couch for two hours and couldn’t remember later if he’d been there at all. I must have been turned away from him talking to someone else. Figuratively speaking, Uncle Teddy disappeared.

Then overnight on New Year’s Eve, it became literal. The New Year’s Eve celebration was at Aunt Aurelia and Uncle Jim’s house. (Aurelia and Loraine were twin sisters.) We know Uncle Teddy was there until shortly after midnight, because there’s no way Aunt Loraine could have driven herself home. But the next morning, he was gone.

We didn’t know about it until we showed up at noon for New Year’s brunch at Teddy and Loraine’s house. She was cheerfully bustling around the kitchen, the table already set for a party. As we gratefully soothed our hangovers with her signature (vodka laced) champagne mimosas, the conversation took all the familiar turns, and Loraine’s cooking suffered some as she revived arguments from the evening before. Hoping to distract her, somebody finally thought to ask, “Where’s Uncle Teddy?”

Aunt Loraine’s face suddenly became serious, and in the tone of someone breaking the news that a friend has the flu, said, “Oh honey, he’s gone.”

There was just a beat of silent uncomprehending shock before everyone starting talking: What? What do you mean gone? Where did he go? Is he okay? What are you talking about, Loraine?

She waited a moment for the hubbub to die down before she said, “Well, Teddy raptured. He told me it was coming, the Lord told him. And last night he floated up and away.”

This time the silence was longer.

Uncle Jim said, gently, “Did you see him float away, Loraine? Did you actually see him rapture?”

If anything, Aunt Loraine looked amused. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned off the burners on the stove. “I’ll show you,” she said.

All dozen of us followed her up the stairs, drinks in hand as though she had offered to show us a beautiful view or a new piece of furniture. We all secretly believed we were about to find Uncle Teddy’s corpse, but their bed was neatly made with no one in it, the bathroom was fully visible with no one in it, and she opened the sliding doors onto the small balcony and gestured outside.

No Uncle Teddy, but a surprising scene. One of the folding chairs on the balcony had been tipped over and lay on its side. Uncle Teddy’s brown orthopedic shoes were sitting by a neat pile of discarded clothing. I recognized the shirt he had worn last night, along with pants, socks, and old fashioned white cotton underwear.

“Teddy told me at Thanksgiving that the Lord told him he was going to rapture soon, and we’ve talked about it since. Then, this morning, when I got up he was gone, and (she gestured at the clothes on the deck) I knew it had happened.”

After a moment, into the silence she dropped one last remark. “You don’t need clothes in heaven.”

Brunch was an uncharacteristically silent experience. 

Part 2

We told ourselves that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Aunt Loraine was starting to be forgetful, after all, and maybe she just forgot where he went. The clothes on the balcony were puzzling, but could she have put them out herself? Why? Could she be a lot crazier than we thought? We talked a lot about that. My husband Jason suggested we hire a private detective to find out where Teddy had gone, but nobody wanted to tell anyone outside the family about it and his idea was shot down.

Days passed. The conversation turned from the idea that he just went away for a few days to the idea that something serious might have happened to him. Maybe Aunt Loraine wasn’t just forgetful, but actually psychotic? Could she have killed him in a drunken rage and somehow disposed of the body?

As farfetched as that idea was, it took hold. Josh asked to borrow her car, and she cheerfully and tipsily acquiesced. He drove it down the hill a couple blocks, then pulled over and checked the trunk. He went over the entire interior of the car with a strong flashlight and didn’t see bloodstains or in fact anything suspicious.

Then Jonny took his little boys over to Aunt Loraine’s house, and under the guise of playing catch, checked the whole backyard carefully to see if any soil had been disturbed. Nothing.

Weeks had passed. It was now the end of January.

Josh called to see if we could meet up at Uncle Jim & Aunt Aurelia’s. “We’ve got to figure out what happened to Teddy, we’ve got to strategize what to do.” It was true that there had been no word, no progress of any kind. My brothers, who had always used flattery to get me to do stuff I didn’t want to do, told me that I was Aunt Loraine’s favorite, and I should ask her about getting the police to look into it.

She wasn’t angry about it, she just looked at me in puzzlement. “What do you mean, dear? Didn’t I tell you he raptured?”

“But Aunt Loraine, should we maybe call the police anyway, just in case?”

She just laughed. “Oh, honey, do you think the police can find him in heaven?” She got a good chuckle out of that, and told a few relatives that I thought the city police could track down Teddy in heaven.

So we all gathered at Uncle Jim and Aunt Aurelia’s for a glass of wine on a Friday evening. “Should I whip up something in the blender?” asked Aunt Aurelia, concerned, but we all assured her that wine was just fine.

Still, the conversation veered and circled as usual, and there was a lot of loud talking, as usual, and in the end nobody convinced anybody of anything, as usual. 

Aunt Aurelia was of the opinion that Teddy really had raptured, and was now looking down on us from heaven. (She rolled her eyes upward and looked at the ceiling when she said this.) Others thought he had been kidnapped, but where was the ransom demand? Or that he had just disappeared, maybe with amnesia, but how was he living? 

Some of the cousins still thought Aunt Loraine might have killed him, and there was a lot of arguing about whether that was even possible. She walked with a cane, after all. She might have given him pills or hit him over the head with a baseball bat, but without a body, and without any idea of where she might have put it or how, it seemed like a vanishingly small possibility. My brothers thought he might have met a violent end in some other way, but how do you explain the clothes on the balcony?

Uncle Jim was the only one to not offer an opinion, and it took us a while to notice. He had been as close to Teddy as anyone; they had married twin sisters around the same time and their lives had been parallel ever since. But when someone finally asked him what he thought we should do, he blew up at us. Uncle Jim’s anger was so uncommon, everybody else actually shut up in surprise.

“Why can’t we just leave it alone?” he blurted out. “We don’t know what happened to him, you all think you know but you don’t. I’m sick and tired of this family!”

And he stormed out of the room.

That was a real conversation stopper.

The only thing that happened because of that meeting was that Jonny took his little boys over to play catch in Uncle Jim and Aunt Aurelia’s back yard, and kept an eye out for disturbed soil, but didn’t see anything.

Part 3

For the first few months, people kept seeing, or thinking they saw, Teddy. My brother Pete even chased down a look-alike on the street and almost scared the poor man to death. But after a lot of false alarms, we just let the idea of Uncle Teddy fade away. His name would come up from time to time, but if the question of his whereabouts was mentioned, it just led to a fight and nothing else.

Then, fifteen months and four days after Teddy had disappeared, Aunt Loraine died. She was only in her seventies, but she’d had diabetes and a heart condition for years. Hank found her when he went over to move her weekly trash out to the street. We all felt bad about it. She had been a real character, we told ourselves, a true one of a kind, a hard-partying lady who never slowed down. We conveniently forgot her angry, drunken phone calls and behavior that was sometimes a little too outrageous even for our family.

Her memorial service, at the church she had claimed but almost never went to, was pretty well attended. Our family is a large family, and everyone is always there for weddings and funerals. And there were some neighbors there, and a few people we didn’t know but were probably connected with the church. Aunt Aurelia arrived with Hank, saying that Jim would be right there.

And then, just before the service began, when the music had already started, in walked Uncle Jim, and by his side was Uncle Teddy. At that moment, the minister stood up behind the pulpit and began the service, so though there was a murmur from the family, nobody interrupted. Uncle Teddy nodded to us and gave us a wave, then sat down in the front row.

I’m sure whatever the minister had to say was very meaningful, but nobody in the family was paying any attention. We were all staring at the back of Uncle Teddy’s head and squeezing each others’ hands in shock and shooting meaningful glances at each other.

Afterward, he was of course mobbed by the family in the narthex. Uncle Jim waved us off. “Family, come up to our place now, we’ll talk there.”

I heard Aunt Aurelia apologizing to a church lady that we wouldn’t be there for their carefully laid out coffee and cookies. “The family has to be alone today,” she explained, and we all raced out of the church to our cars, leaving puzzled neighbors and church people to watch us scurry away.

At the house, there was almost no conversation. We gathered in the living room, sitting on the couches and leaning in the doorways, waiting for Uncle Teddy to speak. He cleared his throat and looked around the room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you all, but when I realized I had to leave, that I couldn’t be with Loraine anymore, I asked Jim to help me disappear.”

Our heads swiveled to look accusingly at Uncle Jim. “You knew?” somebody said. Jim nodded. “You bet I helped him. A man deserves to make some decisions in his life. Teddy has been living here in our basement.”

We all looked at Aunt Aurelia. “Don’t look at me,” she said, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

“But Aunt Aurelia, in your own basement?”

“You know I can’t get down there anymore. Not for years.” She waved her cane to show she couldn’t manage the basement stairs.

Teddy said, “That part doesn’t matter. I’m just sorry if I hurt you or caused you to worry.”

“But Teddy, why?” asked my father.

“Loraine… had fine qualities,” responded Teddy. “She was a very beautiful woman when we were young, you know, a real head turner, as we used to say. And she was lively, a lot of fun. She was always up for a party, a weekend trip, an adventure. We had so much fun in those days.” He paused for a minute, remembering. “But time wasn’t kind to Loraine. The drinking was a bigger and bigger thing. I finally told her I thought we should both lay off the alcohol, and I actually did quit, but she just laughed at me when I suggested she quit too. And since I wasn’t drinking with her, I was noticing more things. She got to be difficult… mean. She said some pretty nasty things. She’d pass out, and since I couldn’t carry her upstairs anymore, I’d just leave her on the floor and put a pillow under her head and a blanket on top of her. But she still wouldn’t consider getting treatment or anything. And then there was the family, all of you, and all the drinking and the arguing, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get away.”

Mary said, “You couldn’t just get a divorce?”

“I knew she’d be devastated, and I didn’t actually want to hurt her, just get away from her. And obviously I couldn’t just disappear and turn it into a big missing persons thing and cause her a lot of worry and distress. Also, they might have found me, and that would have been worse for her, so hurtful and mortifying to have her husband run away.”

We all processed that for a moment.

“So I had the rapture idea,” said Teddy. “Sometimes when she was drunk she’d call on Jesus to save her soul, and one of those times I told her I was talking to Jesus, too. Then I worked the conversation around to Jesus telling me I was going to rapture, and I’d see her in heaven, and it was pretty easy after that. I waited till I thought she was completely convinced, and then I just disappeared. Oh, of course I left the stuff on the balcony so she wouldn’t have any doubts. I knew she’d accept it and just go on with her life without having to go through all that grief.”

When he put it that way, it made a lot of sense. Everybody patted him on the back or hugged him or said, “Good to have you back.” Then Aurelia got out the blender and my dad whipped up a batch of blueberry lemon daiquiris, and we all lifted a glass to Aunt Loraine.

But Teddy’s story stuck with me, and Jason and I talked about it a lot the next day when we were sober again. He said it struck a nerve with him, and he knew exactly how Uncle Teddy had felt. “I hate the family parties too,” he said. “So much alcohol, the same old conversations over and over again. I just get tired of it.” Then, “I sometimes think I’d like to rapture too. I love you, but I hate the drinking.”

Long story short, we both quit the alcohol. So did my brothers and several cousins in our generation. And family celebrations were different, with a group of us not drinking. And in that group, Uncle Teddy was the life of the party.