I felt my mouth go dry when he hung up and strolled over to me, as kind as the doctor who is about to tell you how long you have to live.
“I’ll drive you home.”
The shoulder strap of Officer Redman’s patrol car smelled like tobacco and peppermint. He let me sit in the front seat, but I still felt like a criminal. I sat holding the strap with both hands. He was calm and never asked me whom I had been visiting at the prison. In Jenny’s driveway, he opened my door for me like a suitor. Cathy was standing in the doorway, Dan on the porch. Officer Redman gently cupped my elbow as we walked up the steps. I couldn’t look in their eyes, so I kept my gaze on my feet. Cathy held my arm hard as she brought me into the living room. She didn’t offer to run me a bath or give me a pill. I sat and she paced until Dan finished a quiet conversation with the officer outside.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Cathy said aloud, though she didn’t actually seem to be talking to me. Dan stood still as a pulpit, but Cathy moved like a caged thing.
“It’s like I don’t know you,” she said.
“Who were you with?” Dan asked.
“A friend from school,” I told him, my voice sounding paper-thin. “A friend whose father is in jail.”
“You are not going back to that school,” said Cathy. “And I’m not sending her to that private school.” Cathy said this to Dan rather than me. “The drugs are even worse there.” He gave her a scowl, and she was pacing again, holding herself around the middle as if keeping her insides from spilling. “I’m keeping her home.”
This turned my blood cold. “No school?” My voice buzzed, ready to tear.
“I’ll homeschool you,” said Cathy. “Dwayne and Dotty did that for their son.”
“Cathleen.” Again it was not just her name, but a warning.
She shot him a hard look. “Do you even care what that man did to her?”
Dan’s jaw stiffened. Cathy looked sorry, shook out her hands, and then folded her arms so hard you could almost hear it.
“I just can’t stand you lying to me,” she said, and although she looked at me now, I saw Dan shift as if ready to answer her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Are you?” She stared me down, and I wished there were another way of keeping Mr. Brown out of the struggle, but I couldn’t think of one.
“I’ll tell you the truth now,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Cathy looked ill, as if afraid of what she might hear.
“The boy I was with today is the boy I’ve been seeing. His name’s Billy Blake.”
Dan’s expression was sage, but Cathy only frowned.
“You can pull me out of that school if you want to,” I said, “but it would be wrong to accuse Mr. Brown. Please don’t hurt him.”
As soon as the words were out, I felt that the last phrase was a mistake. They narrowed their gaze on me.
“We’ll look into it,” said Dan.
Cathy straightened her hair and wiped her palms on her skirt. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. You’re coming with me to women’s group.”
For two hours Cathy had me cut melon, peel peaches, wash dishes. She chose me a white knit sweater and skirt, which I put on without a word.
We drove to a house that looked almost exactly like Dan and Cathy’s, me holding a bowl of fruit salad on my lap. Jenny’s face was reflected in the plastic wrap, pale and warped in a way I thought Jenny would’ve liked to photograph. A flock of women, all about Cathy’s age, wearing neat slacks, sweaters with tiny pearl buttons, large wedding rings, small flat shoes, and all talking and shuffling dishes, told me I was welcome and they wished more of the youth group girls would attend. The house was as tidy as Cathy’s but had the constant hum of an aquarium pump. I was given the seat across the room from the tank. It was as big as a bathtub, lit from within, and held a dozen fish that circled the blue endlessly. I was given a plate of food, a tiny lace napkin for my knee, and a glass of lemonade.
A thin woman with short black hair who reminded me of a ballerina said grace and started to lead a discussion. Time management was the topic, but they digressed. My stomach was empty, but the smell of food made me feel sick. Even sipping the lemonade made me queasy. I stared straight ahead at the fish tank and let the sleek, leaf-shaped creatures hypnotize me. It looked nice and peaceful in there. But maybe it would seem different from the inside.
“I’m so sorry,” a voice was cooing. “How’s your mom?”
“She’ll get through it,” a redheaded woman answered.
There was something else in the air, another scent that wasn’t food. It was flowers. Then I noticed a bowl of white blossoms on the coffee table.
“We’re going out for the funeral on Saturday.”
I watched the fish go round and round.
“Who’s this they’re talking about?” someone asked.
“Elaine’s father went home to heaven,” Cathy told her.
“No, he went to the great void,” the ballerina corrected. “He wasn’t a Christian.”
Cathy looked sympathetic, and the redhead looked uncomfortable. I watched her as she almost spilled her plate of melon balls and tuna hot dish.
“Well,” said someone, “that’s a shame. Didn’t they have a chaplain at the hospital?”
“He couldn’t have declared,” said the ballerina. “He was in a coma.”
I turned to Cathy. “What are they saying, that her father went to hell?”
Obviously shocked, Cathy whispered, “He didn’t accept the Lord into his heart before he died.” It was as if she would be embarrassed for anyone to hear me having to ask such basic questions. What kind of mother would they think she was?
“How do you know?” I asked Cathy. She just stared at me. The ballerina was watching us now from across the room. “How do you know he didn’t have God in his heart before he died?” Now every eye was on me, and there was only the sound of the aquarium bubbling. “Why does he have to say anything out loud?” I wanted to know. “Someone has to hear it?”
“I don’t think you understand,” said the ballerina.
“I don’t think so either,” I said. “Why does anyone other than God have to hear him say it?”
“It’s a moot point,” said the ballerina. “He was brain dead.”
My heart was pumping at a gallop. I dropped my plate of food so abruptly on the coffee table, two melon balls popped up and rolled around the centerpiece like lolling eyeballs. A roomful of forks stopped in midair. Cathy grabbed my arm.
“Are you saying that God can’t speak to someone who’s unconscious?” I asked.
This sent a wave of disturbed whispers through the room. I shook Cathy’s grip from me and glanced around at them, disgusted. As my eyes scanned over the coffee table, I noticed that the flowers were fake—formed from silk and plastic.
“It doesn’t say anything about that in the Bible,” said the ballerina, as if this would end the discussion.
“Are you saying that God can do only things printed in the Bible?” I asked. I felt an unexplained wave of strength straighten my spine. “I thought God had no limits.”
I heard Cathy gasp.
“God can do anything,” said the redhead. “He knows everything and he sees everything.”
I felt a fever scorch up to my temples. I stood up, which caused Cathy to make a sound almost like a sob. “You have no idea what it’s like to die or go to heaven or not go to heaven,” I told them. “Who do you think you are?” Every mouth hung open. I noticed I was still holding a glass of lemonade. For half a moment, I thought of throwing it. And the redhead could tell I was capable of it—she lifted a protective hand to her face. Instead I set the glass down beside the melon eyes so hard half the contents splatted out. “How can you be so arrogant?” I asked. “You don’t know where her father went.”
Then I smelled that sweet flower scent again, and I knew what it was. Gardenias. And it wasn’t coming from the fake-flower arrangement. And it wasn’t a
scent Cathy wore, but I had smelled it on Dan’s shirt and in his car. Now one of the women in this room was wearing that scent. Someone in this room had rubbed against Dan’s clothes, ridden beside him in the passenger seat with his safety belt pressing on the skin of her throat.
“God speaks to us through his word,” the ballerina managed to tell me, so shaken her voice cracked.
“God speaks to me, too,” I said. My muscles were burning. I could do anything. “He’s telling me right now that someone in this room has been committing adultery.” I studied the crowd, hoping to figure out who had been with Dan by the shocked expression on the guilty woman’s face, but unfortunately, they all looked shocked. “One of you is having sex with someone else’s husband. How about that for a discussion topic?” I pried Cathy’s fist off my skirt and walked straight out of the house.
At first I paced the sidewalk, elated. Then I remembered my vow to commit kindnesses and felt confused. I waited, leaning against the car in the dark until Cathy hurried out to me.
“I’m taking you to therapy tomorrow,” she said, hyperventilating, her hands shaking so badly she dropped the keys twice before she could start the car. I sat in the passenger seat three feet from her side, but Cathy seemed very far away.
What had those women said that had angered me so? That this man who hadn’t called to God with his last breath was now in hell? None of my hosts had spoken aloud to God in their last moments, yet I felt sure they had slipped painlessly into heaven. I myself had cried to God countless times, but, like a magic spell that requires precision, perhaps I had to use the right words.
“God,” I whispered. I closed my eyes, holding my hands tight. “Come into my heart”
The voice I heard wasn’t God. It was a baby crying, but not the hoarse high pitch of a newborn. It was the true tears of a frightened two-year-old. I knew her sound. I think I said something out loud, though I don’t know what. Then I saw water running down dark steps in front of me. Mud and water. And there was a terrible grinding and crashing sound from above. Something howling. My mouth tasted like metal, and I could feel the weight of the little girl on my hip, clutching at my apron with tiny fists.
What I thought was a dog’s bark turned into a car honking. Water was hitting the car window on my side, running down in a curtain. I found that I was clawing at the glass, weeping and coughing. The car was stopped in the middle of the street, and Cathy was shouting at me, holding the seat belt tight across me. I stopped and felt a tingling in my hands where I’d been hitting the window. Now several cars were honking. I looked over and saw that Cathy was trying to dial her phone, but I put a hand over the tiny machine.
“I’m all right,” I said.
She gaped at me, horrified.
I hugged myself, cold to the bone. “I want to walk.”
“What?” She snatched at me as I let myself out of the car. A sprinkler from the yard beside us rained down on me as I slammed the door.
I started walking down the sidewalk, shaking and wet now, not caring what direction I took. I heard her car chime as the driver door opened.
“Jennifer Ann, you come back here.” She was following me at a distance.
I turned to her, suddenly angry again. “You have no idea what you did.”
She waved in apology to a honking truck, having parked her car in the right lane of traffic.
“Stop this right now and get back in the car.” She tried to look angry, but fear swirled through her. The hand that held her phone was shaking. She didn’t try to touch me. She’d stopped a coffin length away.
“You crushed the life out of your own daughter,” I told her. “She ran away because she’d rather wander in limbo than live with you.”
“What are you saying? You sound crazy.”
“She just wanted to write down what she was feeling and take pictures—”
“Is this about the camera?”
“Listen!” I charged forward, wanting to slap her, and she felt it. Panicking, she tried to dial her phone and dropped it on the pavement, where it broke in pieces.
I was right in front of her now, but still she made no move to reach for me. “Jenny tried to obey you. She said her prayers and fasted and copied down Scriptures for you until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then she left.”
Cathy was kneeling on the sidewalk clutching the pieces of her cell phone. “Who left?”
“And I tried, too. I tried to fit into your house.” I knelt beside her and took her arm in my hand. It seemed so alien to feel her flesh so hot under my grip. I remembered weeping at the feet of my first host, wanting to grip her hand, but it was Cathy who was weeping now.
“I tried, but I can’t anymore, and I don’t know how to get out of her body.”
“Jenny.” Tears were running off her chin. “You’re hurting me.”
“Jenny’s dead!”
I released her arm. I’d said it out loud, and as soon as I heard the words, I believed it. Jenny would never come back. I was trapped in her body and in her life forever. I waited for Cathy to put her arms around me in comfort, but there was no embrace. Cars honked and Cathy dragged herself to her feet, but I stayed on my knees and wept into my hands until I heard Cathy talking to someone. I looked up. A blue van had pulled over, and Cathy was asking to borrow the driver’s phone. For one peculiar momerit, I imagined the police arriving and taking me to the same cell as James. But a mental ward was more likely my fate.
“No,” I said, rising. “I’ll get in the car now.”
Cathy turned to me, white and stained with eye makeup. She returned the phone and the van pulled away. The porch light of the house across the street came on. Two other cars had also stopped, their passengers watching this strange drama—a frightened mother and her distraught child weeping on the pavement in a strange neighborhood. A dog barked at us from the yard next door.
The lawn sprinkler stopped just as I approached the car. Cathy kept her distance until I was buckled into my seat again. She said not a word the rest of the trip but muttered to herself, sitting far forward against the steering wheel.
As we rolled up the driveway, Dan was putting something into the back of his car. He slammed the door and waited, arms crossed, as we got out.
“Go to your room,” said Cathy. Her knees were still shaking.
I went into Jenny’s room and sat on her bed. Strangely, the clothes I had used as a fake body under the covers were neatly stacked by the pillow. If Mitch had found Billy missing, the clothes would’ve been thrown about in a rage. But Cathy had carefully folded sweaters and buttoned blouses closed up to the collars.
Through the wall I could hear the rise and fall of anxious voices though not the actual words. When Cathy opened my door at last, her face was stiff. She looked at the floor when she told me to come to Prayer Corner. Dan was standing by the chairs. Cathy asked me to sit, so I sat where I always did. They both stayed standing. The Bible and the journal were gone.
“We’re afraid for you,” Dan told me. “You lie to us and humiliate your mother in front of her friends, cause a scene on a public street.”
“She had some kind of episode,” Cathy said. I regretted scaring her so badly. There were scrapes on her knees from the pavement. “I think we should take her to the emergency room,” she whispered.
“Don’t get hysterical.” Dan’s voice was low, but she succumbed instantly.
“We made you an appointment for a counseling session with the pastor in the morning,” said Dan. “And your mother will be getting home-schooling materials from the district office tomorrow.”
Cathy hovered behind her chair, a marginal player, craving power.
“Mr. Brown never touched me,” I told them. “Why don’t you call my friend?”
“I did.” Dan sighed, pretending it pained him to have to tell me. “Billy Blake says he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “Maybe he was afraid to admit it.”
“I talked t
o his older brother,” Dan said. “He told me the only girl he’s seen Billy with lately is named something like Helen.”
“That’s me,” I said, as if this would explain everything.
Cathy made a sound as if she were frustrated to the point of emitting steam. “Why would he call you Helen?”
I knew that if I tried to tell them the real reason again, they’d have me committed to a sanitarium. I felt the defeat tighten around my ribs.
“Kneel,” said Dan.
It was so unexpected, the syllable didn’t even seem like a word.
“On your knees, young lady,” Dan commanded.
I obeyed, kneeling in the small circle of chairs.
“Pray for forgiveness and guidance,” he ordered.
Now Cathy sat in her chair and folded her hands.
“Leave her,” Dan snapped. Then to me he added, “I’ll come to release you.”
I watched Cathy slowly stand back up. She looked at me for one tortured moment. I had asked her for help, and she had sent me to the lions. I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same.
She covered her mouth as she followed Dan out of the room, and I was left kneeling in the harsh light.
The room was so still, like a museum housed with the dead—boxes of puzzles unsolved and games that brought no joy, a stereo no one danced to, windows that looked out onto a garden in which no one had ever written a poem. But there was one beautiful thing in the room. The phone. The one that had interrupted the Scrabble game—the one Cathy had used to call Dan back and confront him. He had lied about why he was late to the church picnic, and Cathy had held this phone in one hand and the gasoline receipt in the other. The same phone I had used once to talk to James. I didn’t know what would happen if they came back in and caught me, but I took the chance. I lifted the receiver silently and dialed, but the line was busy at the Amelia Street house.