by Greta Boris
I live in Orange County, California, where real estate prices and paychecks exceed most of the country's. It neighbors Los Angeles County, the home of Hollywood. The insatiable lust for fame is rampant here.
Scholars believe most anchorites came from wealthy families, perhaps not unlike those in Orange County. They were responsible for the cost of building the anchorhold, hiring a servant to care for their needs, and for their provisions. Not many in the Middle Ages had those resources.
This may have been another reason these women chose the cloistered life. The elite of any generation stands in the spotlight of their day. With unusual wisdom, they desired to escape society's prying eyes, responsibilities, and temptations.
Unlike the retreat I'm undergoing, for the medieval woman this was a permanent commitment. Local bishops made sure the potential anchoress understood her expenses must be covered not for one year, or five, but for her lifetime. An anchoress who broke her vows and left her anchorhold was damned to Hell for eternity.
From the first draft of She Watches - An Anchoress Perspective by Abigail Travers
***
ABBY COULDN'T SHAKE her malaise. It chased her around the anchorhold like a starving cat. Hot Santa Ana winds were blowing outside. Inside, her cell was stifling. She'd stripped down to a pair of shorts and a tank top, and pulled her hair on top of her head in a messy ponytail. But she was still miserable.
She held her face as close to the squint as she dared. The winds made her sneeze, but she had to have air, or she'd scream. The tourists were out in full force. It was only a week until the Swallows Day Parade, and the birds were having their annual fifteen minutes of fame. This morning alone three young boys, two teenage girls, and one adult male left the path and walked right up to the exhibit wall. They were so close she could hear them breathe.
She couldn't see them, but she knew they were checking the man made nests to see if any swallows had moved in. None had. There were very few swallows at the Mission these days thanks to all the development in the area. Those that had returned had built their own nests rather than use the artificial ones. Luckily for her the foundation hadn’t given up hope in the project.
She ducked as a man with a Canon around his neck snapped a picture of her enclosure. He couldn't see her from that distance, but she didn't know how cameras worked. Maybe it picked up things the human eye couldn't. She didn't want a shadowy image of her face plastered all over the Internet, "New photograph proves Mission is haunted." That's all she needed.
Abby stepped away from the window and paced across her cell four times, but the exercise made her break out in a sweat. She took up her perch at the window again, and waited for a breeze. This was the hardest day she'd experienced yet. It wasn't just the scorching wind, or the dirt itching her scalp and crunching between her teeth, or that her head felt stuffed with puffy balls of pollen. It was that she didn't like herself very much today, and there was no escaping herself.
Her father was right. She should have made her presence known to the police. Instead she put him in the compromising position of having to lie to them. Actually, she should have called out to Steven, the garden volunteer, as soon as he found the girl. She could have made up a story about how she'd gotten trapped in the hold by accident. Asked him to get her father. But she didn't.
She didn't.
That should be engraved on her tombstone—a perfect and succinct description of her life. The number of things she'd left undone was staggering. She should have let Carlos know where she was going. She didn't. She should have said yes, or even no, to his proposal. She didn't. Were marriage and children going to fall into the category of things she didn't do but would regret later?
She should have gone away to college, escaped the small town labels attached to her family name. But she didn't. She'd stayed, and hoped somehow her mother's legacy would disappear from the communal memory. It didn't.
Her greatest sin of omission, however, the sin that had knocked over the first domino, the one that brought the whole line tumbling down, was ever present in her mind. She'd thought, hoped, and prayed that she could shed the guilt by devoting herself to this time of renewal. But so far it hadn't worked.
When Abby was small she’d been gregarious and competed with her big brother for attention as most kids did. But all that changed when he died. She'd gradually become more and more inward. At seven years of age, she decided invisibility was something to strive for.
The idea came to her on a Sunday after Mass. She and her father and mother went for ice cream. The day stood out in her mind because they hadn't gone for ice cream for a full year. Not since Scottie died. They stepped out of church into the bright sunshine, her dad looked at the sky and in a quiet voice said, "I feel like a cone."
Abby came to attention. That was what he always used to say on warm Sundays after Mass. Scottie would answer, "Vanilla, or chocolate?"
Dad would say, "Pistachio."
Scottie would say, "Booger ice cream," and Abby would say, "Gross."
They had the same conversation a hundred times. She'd almost forgotten about it. But when Dad said, "I feel like a cone," it came back like the words of a song you used to know but hadn't sung in a long time.
She'd stopped walking and looked at her parents. She wanted to see if they were really going, or if Dad was just remembering. Her mom and dad did a lot of that these days. But Dad turned right on Camino Capistrano instead of left, and she knew it was real.
She took Dad's hand and skipped next to him. Not a big, full, leaping skip, more like a walk with a hop in it. She figured ice cream meant she was allowed to act a little bit happy.
Her mother sat in the same booth they used to sit in, and Abby and her father went up to the counter. "What do you want, sweetheart?" he said.
She used to get vanilla with sprinkles, but she didn't want to upset her mother. A vanilla cone with sprinkles might remind her of Scottie. She considered the choice as carefully as if she was holding one of the delicate figurines from her grandmother's mantle. "Vanilla," she finally said.
"Sprinkles?" he asked.
"No." Plain was her compromise.
They carried the ice cream to the table, Dad's pistachio cone, Mom's bowl of chocolate and Abby's vanilla cone.
"So what's coming up this week?" Her father asked them both when they were settled. Lots of people ask how your day was, or what you did last week, but Dad always asked about the future. She liked that.
Abby stole a glance at her mother. She was staring at her bowl of ice cream, not eating. She didn't look angry or upset. She didn't look anything. Abby swung her legs to get some of her nerves out, and said, "I have to make a diorama."
"Of what?" Dad said.
"A tide pool. Our class went to the Marine Museum last week."
"Great. That's great." Dad sounded more cheerful than he had in a long time.
"Yeah, it was fun."
He smiled. It seemed like talking about the Marine Museum put him in a good mood, so Abby kept going. "They have this octopus in a big glass aquarium, and the lady there told us how it kept escaping. They'd come in the morning and find it on the floor. Once they found it on a bookshelf. They had to put a big rock on the top of the aquarium to keep the lid on."
"I've heard octopi are pretty smart," Dad said.
"Octopuses," Abby corrected him. "They are."
"What else did you see?"
Abby's cone started to drip on her hand because she was talking so much. She licked the drips before she went on. "They have scallops too. When something bothers them they clack through the water like this." She opened and closed her free hand like an angry scallop.
"Wouldn't want to get snapped by one of those." Her father made a face like he was scared, but she knew he wasn't. Happiness warmed her from her toes up. She'd forgotten how good it felt.
Then Dad laughed. It wasn't a big laugh, but it was the first one she'd heard from him for as long as she could remember. Abby felt a grin spread acro
ss her face. She swung her legs harder, and laughed too.
Whack.
Her mother slammed her spoon onto the table. Dad's mouth snapped shut like one of those scallops. Abby's laugh choked in her throat.
Her mother glared at both of them. "Stop." The word was quiet, but it rang with rage.
"Honey," Abby's dad said, and put a hand on her mother's.
Her mom yanked hers away. "It's not right."
"Scottie wouldn't want this." Dad's voice was soft.
"Scottie will never eat ice cream, or crabs, or go on field trips again. How can you...?" She didn't finish her sentence. How could he what? Eat ice cream? Or laugh? Or be happy?
"No, he won't. But we have another child, and she will." Her father's voice quivered with emotion.
Abby wrapped the rest of her ice cream cone in a napkin and set it on the table. She didn't want it anymore.
"Well I can't go on. Not as long as the person responsible walks around as free as you like."
Dad winced as though Mom had stabbed him. "We have a life to live, Molly. We have each other. We have a daughter to love. It's time to move on. To let go."
That's what Father O'Brien had said in church that morning. Abby didn't usually listen to the sermons, but when Father O'Brien said God had forgiven us so we had to forgive others, Dad had reached across her and taken Mom's hand.
"I will not rest until the world knows the truth." Mom stood and picked up her ice cream. She marched toward the street, stopping only to dump the still full bowl into the trash on her way out the door. Everyone in the shop was staring at them.
Abby's throat ached from holding back the sobs that were trying to get out. If she cried right then, she'd draw even more attention to their family. She wanted to disappear. Desperately. She wanted to pull an invisibility cloak around her shoulders and poof! Be gone. Because Abby knew she was, at least in part, responsible for Scottie's death.
She'd only been five, and he'd sworn her to secrecy. But if she'd have tattled, told her mother about the bike jump at the railroad tracks, Scottie would be alive today. If Scottie were alive, the ripple effects of that accident would never have occurred.
That day at the ice cream shop was the first time Abby had longed for invisibility, but it was far from the last. The further her mother burrowed into her pain and rage, the more erratic she became. The last two years of her life, she walked the streets of San Juan Capistrano talking to Scottie—who really was invisible.
In the beginning Abby's father had tried institutionalizing her. They'd keep her for a month and send her home with a bottle of pills she’d immediately stop taking. Back in she went. Then out again—a revolving door of anxiety and shame—until her father gave up the fight. After that Mad Molly became a town institution. Kids taunted her. Women shook their heads. Men averted their eyes.
When Abby was ten, her mother died of cancer. Abby hardly grieved. Not because she hadn't loved her, but because she'd been losing her by inches for so long there wasn't much left to grieve.
And now, Abby had disappointed the man who'd become everything to her—her father. She'd talked him into helping her with this project at the risk of losing his job and reputation. She'd talked him into lying to the police.
She'd make it up to him, she promised herself. When her book was published, their family name would be associated with something good. Something noble. Something honorable. If she'd been discovered in the anchorhold before her manuscript was ready, everyone would assume she'd gone crazy, like her mom. Sometimes she felt as if the town watched her, waiting for it to happen.
The clack of shoes on cement broke into Abby's thoughts. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman rounded the path near the restrooms. Her steps were short and rapid. Her gait purposeful, unlike the usual rambling of visitors to the Mission. She stopped before the swallow exhibit, but only gave the nests a casual glance. She turned in a slow circle, as if searching for something.
After making a three-hundred and sixty-degree turn, her gaze locked onto Abby's squint. She stepped forward. Abby stepped back. The woman looked in both directions, then walked off the path and headed straight for the window.
Abby slid into the darkest corner of her cell and cursed her lack of clothing. Her arms and legs, pale from not having seen the sun in weeks, seemed to glow in the dim light. Her gaze fell on the navy blue blanket on her bedroll—a camouflage.
She reached out a hand, but before she could grab it, she heard scratching and inhaled a whisper of unfamiliar perfume. Abby turned. The woman's face was pressed against the bars of the squint. Pulse racing, Abby scrutinized the anchorhold. What did the woman see?
Abby kept her possessions stowed against the walls where daylight wouldn't touch them. A precaution. But she'd grown sloppy. The strap of her dark green backpack lay coiled in the light like a heat-seeking snake. One scuffed white sneaker sat exposed in the center of the space. She squeezed her eyes shut like a child playing peek-a-boo. If she couldn't see them, maybe no one else could either.
"Excuse me, ma'am." It was a man's voice.
Abby's eyes popped open in time to see the woman's face disappear from the window.
"You're not allowed to touch the exhibits, ma'am." It must be a docent, or a security guard.
"I was just curious," the woman said.
"I understand, but you need to stay on the path."
"I didn't know." Her voice was haughty, unused to censure.
Short, rapid footsteps receded into the distance, followed by the clump of a heavier tread. Abby snatched up her shoe, dragged her backpack into the shadows, and huddled into her corner again. She didn't move until the sunlight narrowed into the thin sliver that meant it was noon.
CHAPTER TEN
FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 12:10 PM
CARLOS DECIDED TO go by the Basara house one more time on his way to San Juan Capistrano to drop off Mimi Jackson's bid. He hated sending bills to collections. Not only did he lose money in fees, but it made enemies.
The same white SUV was in the driveway when Carlos got there. As he walked up the path to the front door, he noticed signs of neglect were already showing. His guys hadn't been by for over a week. The lawn looked ragged, and the flower beds needed to be weeded and dead-headed. In another week or two the homeowners association would be after them.
Carlos didn't bother ringing the bell. He knocked and waited. A long time. He looked through the glass sidelight and saw someone coming. The guy who opened the door was young, high school or early college-aged. "Yes?" He looked at Carlos like he was a salesman, or a JW, or something.
"I'm looking for one of your parents," Carlos said.
"My mother is home."
"Can I talk to her?"
"I'll see if she's busy." The door closed in Carlos's face.
Mrs. Basara opened it a minute later. He hadn't seen her since the day he'd pitched his services. He usually dealt with her husband.
"Mrs. Basara," Carlos held out a hand. She looked at it a little too long before she shook it. "I'm sure it's an oversight, but I stopped by to let you know your payment is overdue." He handed her an invoice.
She took the envelope. "I'll give it to my husband."
"I was hoping to collect," he said before she could close the door.
Her face got hard. "My husband has the checkbook."
The look reminded him of the one Mr. Peevers had given his dad on his front porch years ago. Carlos had never forgotten it. It had branded him like a hot iron.
Rojo Landscaping was a two and a half man business then, his father, his uncle and him. He was twelve and only worked afternoons and weekends during the school year. Peevers had hired them to re-landscape his front yard. It was a big job. It would more than the double the company's usual monthly take, and his dad had plans for the money.
Papa was excited about the income, but more than that, he was proud. Every night on the way home, he would say, "This is the kind of work we should be doing. Not just mowing lawns and clipping hedge
s." It was true. His dad was an artist.
The yard looked great when they were done. Better than great. It was everything Peevers had asked for, and more. His dad patted him on the back as they walked to the house to talk to Peevers, acting like he'd been a real asset.
Carlos knew something was wrong as soon as Peevers opened the door. He was usually all smiles, and stupid jokes and loud laughs. But not this time. This time his face was serious. Papa asked him to come check out the job. He said he was busy. Papa said he needed to be paid whether Mr. Peevers came outside or not.
That's when Peevers' double chin wobbled, his fat lips got thin, and he went cold. Frozen solid. "I'll need to see everyone's green cards before I pay you a cent," he said.
His dad was legal. He wasn't a citizen yet, but he and Mama were legal. But he'd hired a couple of day laborers to get the job done on time, and they must not have been. Papa didn't even argue. He just turned and walked away, and they ate beans and rice for two months. Dad had paid for everything, the new shrubs, trees, sod, everything.
"My men won't be coming back until you pay the bill in full." Mrs. Basara's nostrils flared. "But as you said, I'm sure it's just an oversight," Carlos said.
She closed the door, and his stomach churned all the way to San Juan Capistrano.
It wasn't until he pulled up Mimi Jackson's driveway that he forgot about it. He took one look at Paul Travers' house and started worrying about Abby instead. What was he going to do about her? Fight for her? Let her go?
There'd been an emptiness in his chest all month. But he didn't see how he and the book could co-exist. He hated it. It had taken over Abby's life like a cult leader.
Mimi met him at the door before he had a chance to knock. She looked surprised to see him. "Carlos."
"I brought the bid. Is this a bad time?"
"It is. I'm sorry. The school just called. My son got hit by a baseball. Can you believe it? He doesn't even play baseball. It's probably not serious, but I've got to run out. Can I take the bid and call you later?"