“He left,” she cried. “He’s divorcing me and marrying Judy Morgan. They’re moving to San Diego.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“She sat there at women’s group as if nothing was wrong.” Cathy looked at me in amazement. “She sits in the pew behind us every week.” Then she looked startled. “What did she say to you this morning in the pastor’s office?”
“Nothing.”
Her tears overcame her again. “He doesn’t want me.” She looked at me as if I wouldn’t believe it if she didn’t say it right to my face. “He says I’m too rigid,” she told me, her eyes strangely glowing from the pain. “I’m too rigid.”
I pulled a towel from the rack over my head and handed it to her.
“I wasn’t even saved when I met him,” she said, wiping her face. “He said he couldn’t date outside the church. He was the one who taught me.” She looked at the makeup on the towel and started crying again, holding the cloth to her eyes. I got up and wetted a washrag, touching it to her hand. She gasped back a sob and looked up. “He said I’m stifling him—” She broke off as I wiped her face with the cold cloth. “He’s not comfortable living with me anymore.”
“Could it be,” I said, “that he’s a hypocrite?”
For one half second she looked at me, astonished, as if she might laugh again, but then I saw the reality crash in, the idea of being alone, of everyone in her life finding out.
A sudden sorrow filled my chest. I imagined James slowly walking the bases on the empty baseball field at night and the ghost of his friend Diggs trying to talk to him all those years, wanting to free him—the regret of all those desolate nights clutched at me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.
I knew I wouldn’t hear James call to me that night or the next. I would never be able to hear his voice again.
“I’m sorry I was rigid to you,” Cathy sobbed.
The childlike wording brought me out of my thoughts. “What do you mean?”
“You’re rebelling,” she said. “I was too strict. Now you’ll hate me, too.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t have to be like me,” she wept. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Nobody does,” I told her.
“I don’t even know what to think about God.” She stopped, staring at nothing, looking terrified. “Did he lie about God?”
“Don’t worry.” I tried to sound comforting. “God loves you.” But all the while I got her to her feet and helped her wash her face, all the while I got her a sedative and sat her down on her bed, all the while I made her tea, I wondered, But what about God? Does He love me? If He does, why did He leave me trapped here? Why did He give me James and then take him away?
When I walked in with the mug of tea, Cathy was weeping again.
“It’s my fault,” she sobbed as I put an arm around her shoulder.
“No,” I told her.
“What happened to you at school,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you have friends. I burned your pictures.”
“My pictures?”
“I drove you away from God,” she confessed, and then her weeping made her cough so hard she had to fight for air.
“You burned my photographs?” I asked, rubbing her back.
Cathy nodded.
“Not all of them,” I told her. I gave her the tea and put the blankets over her legs, then went to my room. When I came back with the envelope, she stared at me with large pink eyes. I sat beside her on the bed and took out Jenny’s art.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Look.” I showed her a picture of a hand stretching to touch a leaf. “See? It’s called ‘Adam’s Reach.’”
Cathy took the picture with trembling fingers and gazed at it.
“And this one,” I handed her a picture of Jenny leaping with a burst of light instead of a face. “This one’s called ‘Spirit.’”
Her tears had eased into a slow, hot crawl. Cathy leaned close to me to see each image.
“And this one.” I handed her the untitled photo of blurry bird wings and invented a name. “It’s called Angels.’”
Cathy smoothed the surface of the picture to remove a fingerprint.
I handed her one of Jenny, nude, sitting with her head down on her raised knees, her face hidden. “‘Gethsemane.’”
Cathy took my hand in hers and held the back of it to her chest, the way James used to. A sorrow I hadn’t expected shook me. I let her rest on my shoulder and waited until I felt her breathing slow and her grip go slack before I slipped away. She lay with Jenny’s images spread over her like petals on a wedding bed.
I stood in the hallway for a long time. I stared at the carpet, smelled the sweet, smoky scent of what had been the Prayer Corner. I stood there and could not move. If Jenny had been devastated by a boy at school who had left her brokenhearted, she could have wept with Cathy. They could have held each other all night, whispered in the dark like little girls in the attic, keeping each other brave through a night of strange sounds and shadows. But I couldn’t tell Cathy about James. I would never be able to tell anyone about him. Never be able to tell anyone who I was.
As I went to Jenny’s bathroom and began to fill the tub, I knew what I was doing wouldn’t help Cathy. But there was nothing I could do for her. She needed her little girl, but that little girl was long gone. I undressed and opened the cupboard behind the mirror, lifting down the bottle of sleeping pills. I counted thirty-three. With the steam fogging the tiny room, I balanced the bottle of pills on the corner of the tub. I stepped in, slowly lowered myself into the hot water, and turned off the tap. I could hear the dripping of the faucet into the bath water and the small sounds of birds outside the window. Somewhere far away there was a siren.
Somewhere nearby, I thought, Cathy’s husband was holding in his arms a woman who is not his wife and was feeling relieved that it was finally done. Not far away, Mr. Brown was standing in a room full of children, many of whom would have already heard rumors. And only a few miles away, Billy and Mitch were trying to revive a rusty engine.
But James was gone.
It was time to stop. I took one small white pill from the bottle and looked at it. Like the button from a baby’s dress. I put it in my mouth and scooped a handful of warm bath water up. I swallowed and tried two the next time. I found that the pills were small enough so that taking a few at a time was not difficult. Cathy may not survive this, I thought, and Dan may think that Jenny did this because he left them. These thoughts should have stayed my hand, but my mind and heart were already going to sleep. Either God would take me in his arms, or he wouldn’t. I tried to imagine heaven, but all I saw was dark water.
I felt my stomach tighten as I swallowed my fourth handful. I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths as I felt the pills creep down my throat. Then the faintest of all possible flutters, like a tiny bee shaking its wings, tickled inside me. I put a hand to my belly, flat and soft in the warm water, and fear jolted me. This felt familiar. My pulse started racing, but the drug was already pulling down on my arms and head like heavy snow on tree limbs. I gripped the side of the tub with one hand as I slid back, water up to my shoulders.
Had James and I made a child together? Even that, being but a pinhole of hope to me now, couldn’t move me. I knew it was wrong, what I was doing. Like murder, but I needed to be done with it all. I felt my lids begin to relax and my heart beat slowly.
And then I felt I was being watched. I opened my eyes and focused on the room. There was no one there, only tile and mirror and tub. But there was someone there, curious about the speck of life inside me. She’d come back. Something that was happening here had called Jenny back. I felt that she was just behind me, but when I grasped the side of the tub to turn and look, I sent the remaining pills flying out of the bottle to roll across the floor like a broken string of pearls. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. A small oval face with large eyes and golden hair.
She was there, s
hyly waiting for me to die, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted as if she might speak. She stood at the far end of the tub and watched with empathy but made no move to save the body that had once been hers.
Please, I thought at her, come in. I’m going.
I could feel the water tickling at my neck now. The hand that held the side of the tub slipped and splashed into the bath. And now there was something else in the room. A presence dark and nauseating. The same blackness that had thrown me out of a ladies’ room at the mall. The evil inched out of the base of the wall and across the tiles. Jenny’s spirit did not seem to see it.
Hurry, I thought at her. Hurry, sweetheart.
Water black, muddy, and ice cold trickled down the cellar’s walls and steps. The roaring outside shook my nerves, but I smiled and said, “It’s all right, baby. It’s just a storm.” My daughter, not yet two years old, whined and clung to me with all her tiny might, her fists full of my blue dress and dirty apron and her legs around my waist. I held her on one hip as I put the lantern on the shelf and looked around for the wooden stool that I used to store down there. The distant sound of glass breaking made me sorry that I hadn’t thrown a blanket over the bookcase with my favorite books. Although the cellar was no bigger than a wardrobe, I couldn’t find the stool, only firewood, broken tools, my straw baskets on the lower shelves. A crack of thunder and a flash made the child scream and begin to cry. I myself jumped and held her to me hard, then thumped her back cheerfully.
“Hush, baby girl.” I sat on a stack of wood and she hid against my chest, still wailing. We had fled to the safety of the cellar when a broken tree branch smashed through the bedroom window and a loose fence post shattered a kitchen window moments later. But the cellar, which had seemed so sound at first, was slowly filling with rain. Water, two inches deep on the cellar floor, reflected the lamplight in little gold worms that appeared and disappeared. When the next crack of thunder split my ears, I shrieked and was on my feet at once. Half a moment later there was a crash that shook the whole foundation of the house and rattled my bones and teeth. The baby stopped breathing for one moment, then cried even louder. At once dark water was gushing into our hiding place through the seams in the slanted wood doors.
In disbelief, I watched for ten full heartbeats as a lake began to rise up my legs. Then I rushed to the doors and pushed on them, but they wouldn’t move. Something was blocking them, holding them down. I couldn’t put the baby on the floor, so I sat her on the woodpile and attacked the doors with all my power. Time slowed to an agonizing crawl as I searched for tools, then started hacking at the planks of the cellar doors with a broken garden hoe. I was slowed, but the water kept coming. Maybe the river, more likely the water tank. I tore at the wood with my bloody fingers and called for my husband, though I knew he was miles away.
The baby was crying so hard that I looked back and saw that even on the woodpile, she was chest deep in water. I snatched her up and sat her on the shelf. I went back to the doors and clawed and screamed at the stubborn wood until a plank finally tore free and I could see out. The enormous trunk of our oak was now pinning the cellar doors shut. It didn’t move an inch no matter how I raged at it. The opening through which I could see the outside world was only about as large as a cat. The water was up to my shoulders now. My teeth were chattering when I took my baby daughter in my arms and said, “Sweetheart, you run to Fanny’s house.”
The storm that howled outside the mouth of the cellar looked terrifying, but now the water was to my neck. The baby held me around the head, clutching my hair and crying. “It’s all right,” I told her, moving to the gap in the jagged planks. “I’ll come later. You go to Fanny. You run to Fanny’s house.”
She protested in wild yelps, but I pulled her off my neck and pointed her out the hole. “Not to Grandpa’s,” I said. That was downhill and too near the river. “Fanny’s house. Run!” A bobbing basket tapped against my shoulder.
I held her waist as she crawled through the tiny space, sputtering as water hit her face. The lantern hissed and the small gold light behind me was gone. Once free, the baby turned around and peered back into the gap. The water was up to my chin. I coughed as a small wave surprised me. I spit the water out. It tasted like iron and soil.
“Mama?” she said.
“Don’t wait for me, baby,” I called. “Run!” She turned and disappeared into the storm. If I had been wiser, we would both be wrapped in a quilt under the bed upstairs. Another bone-tearing crash made me suck in water and gag. From above a high scream pierced me like a blade and was cut short as if the flood swallowed my child whole.
I felt water at my chin, still warm but not hot. I blinked and spoke out loud. “I killed my baby.” Then I felt a hand on my belly, but it wasn’t my own hand. I felt a falling sensation in my middle. My own hand drifted to the surface of the bath, and then my whole self drifted to the surface of my body. Not my body. Hers. I floated above and the body slipped below, gold hair spread on the surface of the water, darkening as it became wet. A hollow sound like an empty seashell began to softly ring from the tub.
The girl Jenny was watching this. “Go,” I wanted to tell her, but I was as mute as when I was Light and hovering around Mr. Brown. Oozing like black mud, the evil was moving closer to the body than the girl was now, almost to the edge of the tub. Take the body, I thought at her. I can’t get through again. You have to.
Jenny slid down into the water with her body, and the flesh trembled. Then the eyes opened at me. “Thank God,” I thought, but next moment, a bubble rose from the face and the lids started to drift shut.
“No!” I tried to shout at her. “Wake up!” Her hair drifted down to her shoulders, too heavy to float now. Jenny wasn’t breathing. I tried to touch her, but I was formless. Furious, I screamed at the bathtub with the naked girl sleeping below like a white doll.
If you exist, I told God, you help me.
I ducked into the water and brought my lips right to her ear. “Wake up!”
So many times I had moved a curtain or startled a bird into flight when I was trying to be silent and invisible, and now that I was frantic to slap her out of her apathy, I could not even ripple the surface of the water. She had gone back into her flesh, and yet the blackness that had crept into the room hadn’t fled. Did it not realize that she was no longer empty? The blackness dripped up the side of the tub and relaxed into the water, coloring it a smoky gray.
Something about the arrogance of this infuriated me.
I came in as close to Jenny’s face as I could in the darkening water and yelled, “Fight!”
Her body jerked, she opened her eyes again, and then she was sitting up, coughing and sputtering. The evil disappeared, leaving the tub clear. Jenny vomited and cried out in horror at the small white pills in the bath water with her. In confusion and repulsion, she let the water out of the tub and pushed the pills away from her as they went down the drain. She sat bewildered and shivering. She turned the hot water on and took a handful of it, drinking it down in a panic. She saw the pills on the tile floor. She sat in the tub, naked and wet, the tap flowing warm water over her feet.
I watched this from above her. I was like a kite caught in a tree at the corner of the ceiling. Then Jenny jumped at the sound of the doorbell. It rang over and over until the sound of Cathy’s voice was heard, strained and rising. Now there was knocking at the bathroom door. “Jenny?” Cathy tried the handle, but the door was locked. “Are you feeling sick?” Jenny turned off the tap and listened, eyes wide with fear.
Then a boy’s voice. “Jenny?” It said. “Can I talk to you?”
Then Cathy, “Honey, there’s someone to see you.”
Jenny didn’t answer. She seemed paralyzed. It was as if she didn’t know where she was, who she was, who were her enemies. The two voices argued in whispers.
“I’m serious.” Cathy called through the door. She put on her calm but stern voice. “This is your mother speaking. You let me in this minute.” The knoc
king grew to a loud thumping. The hinges rattled.
“Are you hurt?” The boy’s voice again.
“No.” Jenny’s voice was so soft no one had heard.
“Open this door!” Cathy was getting shrill. “I’m going to call the police.”
The door handle shook until the pills on the floor started vibrating. Then the sound of Cathy’s voice as it moved down the hall. “I’m calling 911.”
“I’m all right,” Jenny called.
The door burst open with a crack of wood, and Billy Blake was standing on the tile floor, a sleeping pill crunched under his shoe.
Jenny hid her nakedness, holding her knees in front of her, shivering and staring at him in amazement.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a trembling jaw.
Billy took a towel and draped it over her shoulders as he kneeled down by the tub.
“I’m sorry I said I didn’t remember you when you came to see me today,” he said.
“I came to see you?” She stared at his face as if she were trying to recall a dream she’d had.
“After you left, I found this in my room.” He took something from his back pocket and showed it to her. “This is us,” he said.
With wet hands, she held the sides of the little black-and-white photograph, blurry and overexposed, two laughing faces close together, naked shoulders.
“I’ve been having some trouble remembering things,” he told her.
She looked at Billy, still stunned. “Me too.”
“You look happy with me,” he said, as if this were unbelievable.
Jenny stared at the faces in the photograph with tears in her eyes, then took a breath. “Yeah, I do.”
He sat down and, as she studied the picture, he gently rubbed the towel on her wet hair. She looked back at his face and asked, though it seemed to embarrass her, “Is your name Billy?”
He laughed. “Yeah.”
All this I observed from the corner of the ceiling above them, but now I was passing out of the room, right through the roof. I felt my heart fold out like a blossom not only because Jenny had saved herself and Billy had found her but also because I was being drawn to heaven at last. I was sure I could see some light ahead and then James smiling at me as if through a hole in the sky no bigger than a cat.