A Certain Slant of Light (46 page)

  
I had been feeling weak and numb, but now, watching Cathy's
pain, I felt a surge of power the way I had when I'd shocked the
church ladies. It felt as if the joy of loving James followed by the
pain of losing him had galvanized something in me. "What did
Dad do?" I asked.

  
"Didn't I tell you to go to your room?" She struggled with the
book, twisting it at the spine. "Why do you have to fight me?
Why can't you help me?"

  
I stepped closer, standing eye to eye with her, and took the
book from her hands. Taking a firm grip, I wrenched it savagely
down the middle and tore it in two, putting the pieces back into
her limp hands.

  
She was so surprised, she just stared at me and let the pieces
fall at her feet. Now I moved back out of the way and waited to
see what else she wanted to destroy. In her eyes I saw a flicker of
realization—we were allies now—I would never side with Dan
against her.

  
"Thank you," she said softly, then walked past me into the hall.

  
I followed her back to the den. She stopped in the middle of
the room, staring at the Prayer Corner where the Bible and diary
sat each on its chair. I stood beside her and she looked at me for a
peculiar moment. Then we rushed as one at the trio of chairs. Cathy managed to tear the leg off one and the cushion off an
other, the stuffing flying in every direction. I ripped the pages of
the diary into little paper petals and tossed them over our heads.
Cathy was still shaking, but now she was laughing. She flew at
the cupboard on the wall and came back with a crystal decanter. I
shrieked and jumped out of the way as she tossed what might
have been brandy over the toppled chairs and shredded paper. I
started laughing as well but picked up the Bible that lay half
buried in cotton batting, saving it from the dousing.

  
Next Cathy grabbed the box of matches from beside the fireplace and struck a light, tossing it at the chairs. The flames undulated faster and higher than either of us expected. After a
few seconds of delight, Cathy ran for the extinguisher from be
hind the door and spat white foam over the fire. I was still stamp
ing out bits of handwritten Scripture that had levitated into the
room and threatened to melt the carpet when Cathy dropped the
red canister at her feet and swayed. She wasn't laughing any
more.

  
The deafening buzz of the smoke detector made us both cry
out. We jumped at the plastic shell, where it clung to the ceiling
just inside the door, but missed it by inches. I ducked as Cathy
smashed it to bits by throwing the empty decanter at its blinking
eye. It hung in two mute pieces. The smoke smelled like caramel.

  
Cathy clutched at her mouth and ran for the master bedroom.
I followed. She lunged for the toilet and vomited, then collapsed
on the bathroom floor, crying with her face on her knees. I had never been in the master bedroom. The bathroom carpet was as
soft as a bed. I crept up to her, almost afraid she'd bolt away like
an animal. Sitting down beside her, I put my hand on her head. She rattled and her voice was a hoarse, tortured wail. I stroked her hair and remembered wanting to touch my hosts when they
wept, but when I was Light, I had never been able to feel their
hair or wipe their eyes. Her hair was as soft as a baby girl's.

  
"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 wings and invented a name. "It's called 'Angels.'"

  
Cathy smoothed the surface of the picture to remove a finger
print.

  
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 dev
astated 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 noth
ing 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 bot
tle 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.