The Talk-Funny Girl (36 page)

But I stayed, watching my mother, listening to the beep of a machine at the far side of the bed.

I turned my lips in between my teeth. The sound of the beeping machine changed slightly; my mother twitched but kept breathing. One of the nurses stood back away from the bed like she was giving up, but the doctor was still leaning over my mother, the machine still going along. I listened to it for a few seconds with my eyes closed. Aunt Elaine squeezed my arm. My mother twitched again and let out a groan. I went up to the bed, pushing a little bit to get beside the doctor. I put my hand around my mother’s wrist, looked at her one last time, and then turned away and went out the door. I took the elevator downstairs and sat with Sands in the larger waiting room. After a time he reached out and put his big callused hand over mine, and I turned my palm up so I could put my fingers between his. It wasn’t much longer before Aunt Elaine came out of the elevator and toward us. She asked if I wanted to come say good-bye to the body. I said that I did not.

“The baby is alive,” she said. “You could see her. Do you want to?”

Upstairs we went again, Sands with us this time. We stopped at a different floor, and turning and walking along the hallway, I felt as though I was carrying a huge stone weight in my middle.

In a glassed-in room, in a glass box with tubes running into it, there was a pink girl so tiny it seemed to me she could fit inside a winter hat. It was warm and light in the box. Dressed only in a tiny diaper, the girl seemed as fragile as a robin’s egg, with miniature hands and
feet, and eyes that opened from time to time but didn’t focus on anything. A tuft of damp dark hair showed at the top of her head. She had wires attached to circles of white tape on her chest. I stared at her, felt Sands put his hand on my back. I leaned in for a closer look at the girl’s wrinkled face and heard my aunt say, “The doctor thinks she’s going to live.” And I tried to say a prayer for that, tried to picture a God you could ask for something good like that.

L
ate that night the three of us sat at the table in Aunt Elaine’s kitchen and ate Chinese food we’d bought on the way home. Sands had taken a shower. He and Aunt Elaine were drinking beer; I had a glass of Coke. After a while Aunt Elaine got up and poured some beer into another glass and set it in front of me and I took a sip and held it in my mouth a moment before swallowing. As he had been from the time he’d carried my mother into the emergency room, Sands was like a statue of a man, barely speaking. I had a few bites of chicken wings and a few sips of the beer but it was hard for me to eat then. Part of it was because of my mother, but I also had a sense, from my aunt’s silence, and from Sands’s, that there was something else in the air around us. I waited, and waited, and wouldn’t let myself ask. At last Aunt Elaine said, “Your father was stopped on the highway for speeding. When the police saw the blood in the truck they thought something about him that isn’t so, and they arrested him.”

“Okay,” I said. I had suspected it was something like that. It was as if some other stream of knowledge that had nothing to do with words was already inside me.

A memory came over me then of my father walking with me up to the north end of Waldrup Road, to the state park line there. This was before Ronald Merwin lived in the only other house on that section of road and before Pastor Schect had come into our lives. I was five or six. My father knew a trail there that led to a very small pond. It was a hot day. He let me take off my clothes and swim and when I came
out—naked and cool and happy—he took off his shirt and dried me with it. I remembered how he’d kept his head turned away and then left the shirt over my shoulders so I wouldn’t shiver.

Sands ate the Chinese food slowly, bite after bite, as if he was very hungry. He didn’t talk and couldn’t make eye contact with me. Aunt Elaine said that she knew it was hard to lose a mother—she’d lost her own mother, too, a long time ago—but I could tell she was only trying not to say anything bad. Very late, Sands said he had to go, and Aunt Elaine asked him to stay and sleep there on the couch but he didn’t want to. “I’m going home to pray a little,” he said. “After a day like this.” We all stood up. Sands hugged me against him for the first time, and hugged and kissed his mother, and then he asked for another blanket for the seat and went out the door and we listened to his truck starting up.

I cleaned up the food scraps and brought the glasses to the sink in a kind of trance. Aunt Elaine came into the kitchen and put a hand on my shoulder and turned me around. “You come and get me in the night if you want to,” she said. “Think of a name for the baby if you can. Think of a good name for your sister.”

Thirty

F
or a while after that terrible day, we didn’t work on the cathedral. We buried my mother in a cemetery in Watsonboro, without delay and without any church service or any friends in attendance. My father couldn’t be there. It seemed wrong to me, to have a human being go into the ground with so few people watching. I half hoped that someone—even Mrs. Jensen from the 112 Store or a person from Pastor Schect’s church—might suddenly appear as my mother’s casket was being lowered into the ground, but no one did.

The baby had to remain in the hospital for several weeks, and I went to see her whenever I could. Aunt Elaine let me choose the name. Lillian was what I decided on, after a lot of thought, because I liked the music of it, and liked the nickname she’d have, Lily, and because I didn’t want the girl to have a name that was connected to anyone—not my mother, my father, my aunt, or anyone we knew. I wanted her to have a fresh start in life and not be linked to anything I had lived through or anything about my parents. That was foolish, probably—she was born with so much of my mother and father in her, so much of their confusion and stubbornness. I have seen that over the years. I have lived in the knowledge of it and dealt with the trouble from it. But that was the way I felt at the time.

The other thing I felt then—this might seem strange but it is true—was an overwhelming sense of relief. I find now that when I think of my mother, I picture a darkness, as if the center of her was a shadow. Even then, before I knew some of the things she’d done on her rides in the country with my father, I thought of her that way. I’ve met plenty of people now whose mothers were loving, caring, giving souls, and I’ve seen, in Sands, how the gift of a mother like that echoes down through the generations, deep in the hidden inner life of sons and daughters. With every ounce of my strength I have tried to be a mother like that.

But my own mother was a dark ghost who had rare sparkles of tenderness. The rest of the time she sucked the world into herself and turned it to ash. Not that my father was so much better, but in him at least there was a simplemindedness that could occasionally look like compassion. He wasn’t so eager to raise his hand when Pastor Schect asked for a child to be faced. He let it happen, yes, but he wasn’t eager for it to happen. He did evil things, and he would pay for doing them, as he should. But my mother had some other dimension to her, and in the deepest part of me I knew that.

In the days after her burial, I sometimes found myself wondering if she would pay for the harm she’d done. And if so, how? What did Sands’s kindly God do with a spirit like that?

Two days after my mother was buried, with Lily still in the hospital, I was sitting on the porch of my aunt’s house when Aunt Elaine came outside with a newspaper clutched in her two hands. She didn’t sit down. She said, “There’s something in here about your father being arrested. I didn’t know if you wanted to read it or not, honey. It’s not easy to read. We can talk about it afterward if you want, but I won’t say anything unless you do, okay? If you don’t want to talk about it for now, I understand. If I can, I’ll try to make it so people don’t come here, and no one calls you, but I might not be able to.”

My aunt handed over the newspaper and retreated into the house. For a long time I sat holding it and not looking at it, watching people
go past on the sidewalk, studying the leaves to see if they were turning yet, smelling the end of summer in the air and feeling a thin film of sweat forming on my palms because that stream of knowledge was working again, and I had a good idea what the article might say. I knew they wouldn’t have kept my father so long just for speeding, or just for having blood on the seat of his truck. At last I took up the paper and opened it. I read the first part of the article, which was on the right-hand side of the front page, and then, after thinking about what I’d read and building up my courage, I turned to a page inside and read the rest. There was a photograph of my father there, taken at the police station, but not one of my mother.

When I finished, I left the newspaper on the porch, went to my room, and closed the door. I lay down on the bed, faceup, and I began to weep, trying not to make any sound my aunt could hear. I wept for a long time, the tears streaming down and into my ears, and my body trembling and the fingers of both hands clutching the fabric of the quilt. On and on it went, as if all the trouble and pain inside me had turned to liquid and was pouring out my eyes. When my aunt came to the door and knocked, I tried to stop myself from crying and be as quiet as a girl sleeping, but I couldn’t do it. Aunt Elaine called my name, twice; I didn’t answer. She knocked again later and asked through the door if I was hungry, but I didn’t answer then either. When I finally stopped crying, I fell into a swamp of thoughts. I pulled out a hundred memories and turned them this way and that in my mind. My parents leaving on their overnight outings. My mother holding the knife and coming for me in the woods. The way she could work my father and work him until she convinced him to do what she wanted. The different looks I could see on my father’s face. The times he had talked to me kindly, taken me into the woods and taught me things, taken me to Weedon’s. The times there had been some peacefulness in the house. The things that had been said at Pastor Schect’s church and the hunger on his face when he came across our threshold. I fell asleep with my clothes on and had the most terrible dreams: girls’ bodies broken into pieces and
scattered in the trees, and then a longer nightmare in which I was alone in a house like Aunt Elaine’s, unable to move, and it was dark and there was the sound of footsteps out front. I awoke in my small dark room, shivering. I sat there for a moment, running my eyes over the ceiling and walls, then I went to the kitchen, made myself a piece of toast, and sat there with the light on, looking at it.

The next day I wandered around the yard in a stupor, replaying the memories again and again, searching through them. When people from the local newspaper and the TV stations came and parked in front of the house and started pointing their cameras at me over the fence, my aunt called me inside. We stayed in the kitchen with the front door locked, and she finally had to call the police to get the reporters to stay off the lawn. She waited until the end of the day to ask if I wanted to talk about it.

I told her I couldn’t talk about it then. The tears came up almost as strong as before.

My aunt reached across the table and covered my two hands. “The police want to interview you, to get some information.”

“I couldn’t now.”

“I told them that. They asked if you could write some things down, what happened in the house, what your parents did and when. Sands could do it for you if you’d rather talk to him. You could just talk and he would write it. That might keep you from having to go to the police or having them come here. At least for a while.”

I sank my chin down on my chest and felt my aunt stand up and hug me. I reached up and held her arm against me tight. I felt small then. All the new strength had drained out of me.

Thirty-one

I
waited as long as I could. I stayed in bed a lot, making sketches of buildings and sometimes trying to read.

Sands went out and bought a new truck, different color, different make, nothing in it to remind us of what had been there. On the afternoon when I’d agreed to talk to him, I stood at the edge of the porch and watched for it. One of the neighbors was peeking out at me from her backyard but I pretended not to see her. The press people had come again and again, but we wouldn’t talk to them and eventually the police came and told them to leave and they’d gone somewhere else and, except for phone calls we didn’t answer, mostly stopped bothering us. Aunt Elaine took time off from work, and she and I basically hid out in her house, with the TV off and the newspapers out of sight, leaving there only to visit Lily in the hospital and to buy food. One time the reporters followed us all the way to the hospital and back.

When I saw Sands’s truck—dark green, shining chrome, beads hanging from the mirror—stop in front of the house and saw him get out, despite what I had been telling myself all morning, I thought I would be able to do what everyone seemed to want me to do. It would be better than being called to speak in court, better than facing the police (who were being very kind to me, thanks to Sands’s friend,
I imagine). It would be hard but it would be better than talking to strangers.

Sands wasn’t dressed for work, sneakers instead of boots, chinos instead of jeans. He came up the walk and stopped in front of me and the first thing he said was, “I haven’t been to the cathedral since your mom died. I’ve been sleeping in the rectory but I haven’t set foot in it, haven’t worked on it, have barely looked at it. Will you take a ride with me up there?”

“I could,” I said.

On the way up the highway—out of nervousness, I could tell—he began to talk. He came at his story sideways, telling me first what he remembered from his own childhood: his house and neighborhood; the kind ways his parents had treated him; the way they had told him about the adoption and the way that had made him feel; the times his father had taken him hiking in the mountains of western Pennsylvania and showed him how to pitch a tent and make a fire and track animals by their footprints; his mother’s flower gardens and strawberry pies. He talked and talked, about the river near his house, his love of baseball, his love of going to church and saying prayers. When he reached that point he stopped for a while, then squeezed the steering wheel in both hands and went on, not looking at me, telling me what church had meant to his family and what the minister had meant to him, and then, step by step, how the minister had slowly tricked him, and what he had done to him, and made him do, and how he’d frightened him into not saying anything to anyone, and how he had felt, alone in his room afterward, and for years and years, and even sometimes now. When he was finished with that part he stopped, as if the story of his life ended on the day that man was moved to another city. I had been facing forward the whole time, watching the highway rush toward us, focusing on every word and listening to every feeling behind the words. I waited until he took the exit for the town, and then I said, “And you have that in your mind now always, thinking those things?”