Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

  I remembered a story I’d read in the newspaper a week before, something about how breast milk, or at least that first milk, the colostrum, had been found to have curative powers for cancer patients. I’d read it out loud to Billy at breakfast, watching his face drain of color, as if my hope wore him out.

  “Oh,” he said. That’s all. “Oh.” Then he’d pushed his bowl of Cheerios across the table, unfinished.

  “Come on,” I said, “face it, they’re canteens. I could nurse a small starving nation.”

  He reached out and touched the back of my hand.

  “I could be the hero,” I said.

  It gave me chills just considering what I might do to save my father’s life.

  Genevieve. I turned the name over in my mind as the priest preached to the Sisters of Saint Genevieve in Italian. If my father was saved, I would name the baby Genevieve in thanks. According to the book I’d been reading earlier in the library, Saint Genevieve was the patron saint invoked against plagues and disaster. The name meant “white wave,” beautiful irony considering the convent’s proximity to such a placid body of water.

  Then the priest began to speak in English. Leaning into the pulpit, he seemed to direct his remarks to me alone. “Quoting Jean-Paul Sartre,” he said, his blue eyes burning like gas jets, “if there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

  I sat stunned and motionless, pinned there by his gaze. If there was no God, there was no hope. Nothing. I shifted uncomfortably in the pew. Surely everyone noticed how he was singling me out. Was he trying to prove to me how tenuous my faith was, how self-serving? Or was he saying that of course there is a God, and nothing is permitted—certainly not my flirtation with Catholicism in the hopes of ingratiating myself to God to save my father, nor my base feelings for young Sister Corrina? I stared at the other congregants. The two silent pilgrims were doused in a clear blue light, the woman in front of me mottled violet; only my body was devoid of any beautiful kaleidoscopic deformity. Pain spiked behind my left eye, a fit of coughing rose up inside me like a storm, and a sick ache moved up my spine, twisting my muscles against the rocks of my vertebrae. The congregation rose for the final benediction.

  If there is no God, then everything is permitted. The words pounded behind my eyes as we filed out of the chapel. Head bowed, I hurried down the hall, past a recessed nook housing a small plaster statue of the Virgin Mary clutching baby Jesus to her breast, a cluster of candles lit by people with unanswered prayers burning at her feet.

  I dragged myself up the long wooden staircase to my little room, locked the door, and collapsed on the soft bed, my head pounding. Christ stared down at me with sad reproach, as if he’d known all along that I’d fail.

  After five hours spent dipping in and out of a sick sleep, the migraine began to ebb and I was able to sit up. Achy and nauseated, I slid off the bed and onto my knees, resting my head against the bed frame. I tried to pray, to focus, but all I could think was, I can’t pray. I can’t pray. I can’t pray.

  I didn’t know what God had heard, if he heard Save my father or Save me.

  I thought about calling home and begging Billy to come get me. I considered calling Mary Beth and telling her she was full of shit, that there was no peace here, no escape. But really I wanted to call my father, even if he couldn’t hear me, even if all I could do was hear his voice. I could call and hang up. But I wanted to talk to him, even though I wasn’t sure what I’d say. I wanted to apologize to him.

  Fumbling in my bag, I located the train schedule, but I was too late. There were no trains into the city until morning. I was trapped.

  I thought of Sister Corrina in the library, the indentation her body had left in the cushions, the warm place she had left behind. I wondered how it would be seeing Sister Corrina for the last time, how it would be saying good-bye. I closed my eyes, imagining our hands touching, her lips on my cheek. The blessing she’d give me.

  I stared out the window of my room at the Sound, my hips and knees aching under the baby’s weight. What did this baby matter? Right now it was nothing more than an intruder. In the gloaming, the water was a polished gray, inhospitable, unyielding, and cold as metal.

  The baby inside me pushed off from the floor of my cervix and floated up under my ribs. I sucked in my breath. It was as though I were being turned inside out.

  When I woke late the next morning, it was to the sound of the water. Any thoughts of escaping on the 9:05 were vanquished by the sight of early morning light gilding the blue-green water. Sitting on the low stone wall that buttressed the convent, I spotted Mother Saint Agnes stalking around the flower beds, frowning. At first I thought she was going to scold me for missing Matins, then I noticed again the six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Someone, somewhere, was having a party. She stopped to poke at the eviscerated leaves of a rosebush and shook her head in dismay. She glanced in my direction and gave me a curt nod, then popped the top of a PBR and drained it into the flower bed. She made her way around the flower beds this way, and after draining the last can, she heaved the empties into a blue trash barrel outside the basement door with distaste. Then she retreated back inside the convent.

  I waddled over to the bushes, the smell of beer rising up out of the flower beds. At first the swell of my belly prohibited discovery, then my toes banged into something cool and hard. I took a cautious step back. In the grass was a china teacup filled with beer, and floating in the beer, belly-up, were two flesh-colored, thumb-sized slugs, wallowing drunkenly, their slippery bodies entwined, intoxicated, drowning, oblivious to the danger I might present. Every few feet of the garden ground was planted with these teacup beer traps, the live slugs bobbing like happy hedonists in the foamy ale, the dead slugs sinking to the bottom like a warning.

  “Good morning,” a voice called. I turned to see Sister Corrina waving to me as she hurried down the cliff side overlooking the water. I raised my hand feebly. The smell of beer, earthy, sweet, and rotten, was nauseating.

  “Hello, again,” she said, her hands fighting to keep her veil from blowing across her face and into her mouth. She paused, and then, checking over her shoulder for the Mother Superior, she made a beeline for the basement door. She stopped, her hand resting on the knob.

  “Do you want to see?”

  “Yes. Sure,” I answered quickly. “What exactly?”

  She grinned mysteriously.

  Just as I was about to follow her, I stopped. Someone was watching us. Moseying through the tall grass were the pilgrims. They stopped for a moment, cocked their white woolly heads in curiosity, then slowly ambled up the cliff to a meditation bench with views of the Sound. Was it luck or God’s will that the only witnesses were mute?

  “Are you coming?” Sister Corrina called.

  “Of course,” I said, hurrying after her. If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

  It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, and for a disorienting few moments I couldn’t see Sister Corrina at all. I was unsure of where I was, only that inside it was warm and damp, smelling of dirt and mildew. Then I could make out cans of white paint, Christmas lights, and an ancient push mower. I could see moldy wooden rafters strung with spiderwebs, dust motes captured like tiny swirling hurricanes in the pale, sticky webs, a series of tragic satellite weather photos rendered in spider silk. So accustomed was Sister Corrina to the cryptlike darkness that she seemed oblivious to my blindness.

  “Follow me,” she called as she disappeared into a darkened corner of the basement. She led me toward a wooden worktable strewn with large spotty glass jars, an assortment of stainless steel tweezers, and a range of tiny hammers.

  She flipped on a light, a single yellow bulb that cast a hazy golden aura of light over the muslin tablecloth streaked and splotched with red and brown polka dots. At the back of the table was a row of miniature jelly jars filled with long, thin metal pins, sharp tacks, and what appeared to be elegant carpet staples. There was a clear bottle marked ETHER and a glass decanter of cotton ball
s that would have been more at home on a lady’s dressing table than here among these primitive implements.

  “I searched and searched for a long, long time, I never thought I’d see one,” Sister Corrina said excitedly. “Never. I’d read about it, I’d hoped, but last night I was outside recovering the shears I’d left by the rosebushes and out of the corner of my eye—that is the way you always see these things, out of only one eye—I saw it on the tree.”

  She paused, grinning proudly. “I show it to you first.” She reached down and took my hand, giving it a long squeeze, then let it go just as quickly. She reached to the back of the table and slid forth a large bell jar. She pushed it toward me so I could see that underneath the glass was a luminescent yellowy-green moth the size of a child’s hand dozing on the pillow of an ether-soaked cotton ball. Its sculptured, bow-shaped wings seemed clipped out of felt. The edges of the upper wings were trimmed in a cocoa maroon; the lower wings flared out into delicate points festooned with a violet-and-white dot no animal would confuse with a predator’s eye. Its whitish green body was as plump and furry as a small mouse. The thick-lashed antennae fanned out of the head in pinkish-brown fronds. With two hands, she slowly lifted the bell jar. She pinched the moth’s soft body between her fingers, then laid it reverently on a square wood platform with canvas stretched and stapled over it.

  “Luna moth,” she whispered. “They come out at night. So rare. What was God thinking when he made the luna moth? How pleased he must have been, seeing what he’d wrought,” she mused as she arranged the moth in the center of the platform with a pair of needle-nosed tweezers. Then she selected a pin and pierced the moth just beneath the head, securing it fast to the board.

  I expected blood, but there was none.

  I expected some kind of sound, some crack as the carapace was pierced, but there was none.

  “You have to have faith,” Sister Corrina said, tucking some pins between her lips, which gave her the appearance of a genetic seamstress about to make some transspecies alteration, such as sewing on flippers or adding a tail. Under her breath Sister Corrina said, “Praise be to God,” and pushed another pin through the moth’s middle, where I imagined the heart and lungs and stomach to be. “And to his Son Jesus, and our Mother Mary,” she said, then took up her hammer and tapped the head of each silver pin until it disappeared in the milky-green fur, so the moth seemed to be suspended in space, alive.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  Sister Corrina put down her hammer. “Is it the baby?” she asked, and reached out to cup my abdomen.

  “It’s my father, he’s sick,” I heard myself say, feeling her hand pressing hard against the baby, as though this would explain my sudden swoon.

  “Very sick?”

  “He’s dying,” I said, words I’d dared not speak to another soul.

  “Is he in pain?” she asked, her voice quickening. Then, with her thumb, she pushed two tiny tacks just underneath the body of the moth. I supposed this was so that the weight of the moth’s body wouldn’t pull it down off the nails and tear the wings.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said in a barely audible squeak. “No. I know so.”

  “You’re sad,” she said, surprised. “Is he sad?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer, and it disturbed me. I assumed so. He must be. But I couldn’t answer her question. This didn’t seem to bother her. She propped the luna moth in its wooden box against the stone wall and admired it.

  “I feel as though we’re being punished,” I said, my throat dry.

  “Punished?” she asked curiously, and thought about it as she ran her finger along the rim of the moth’s wing, as though the moth could feel it. “Maybe it’s a gift from God,” she said.

  “A gift?”

  “Doesn’t it make life more beautiful to you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Doesn’t it make life seem more precious, more mysterious…”

  “No. No, it doesn’t. It seems awful.” I was confused by her reaction, angry. I wanted her to tell me everything was going to be all right, that he would be saved, or he would be going to heaven, or something. Anything. I’d expected comfort, but there was none.

  She stared at her moth, then turned to me and touched my face, taking it in her hands. For a moment we just stood there staring awkwardly at each other. Then she shut her eyes, and I believed for a moment she might lay her head on my shoulder, but she inclined her head toward mine, her lips parting. Panic and eagerness flooded my body, but I didn’t move. My hands fluttered at my sides. I was afraid if I moved everything would stop. She’d stop.

  I thought: I could fall into that mouth. Then I did.

  “I just wanted to show you,” she whispered in my ear, “there’s so much beauty.”

  My mother answered on the second ring.

  “Do you feel better, sweetheart? Is it better at a convent?” she asked. What she meant was You’re not Catholic. Wouldn’t your time be better spent here, at home with your father?

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I need to talk to Dad.”

  “How’s the baby?” she asked. “How is he doing?”

  “You really think it’s a boy, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you? No—it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. I just want you and the baby to be okay. That’s all. It’s a good thing to think about.”

  “I need to talk to Dad, okay, Mom?”

  “Oh.” She sounded surprised, a little hurt. “He’s repairing the eaves. I’ll get him for you.”

  “How’s his hearing?” I asked, but she’d already put down the phone.

  After what seemed like an eternity, he picked up. “Honey,” his voice boomed.

  “Hi,” I said. Even though he was out of breath, I liked hearing his breathing in my ear.

  “What?”

  “I miss you,” I yelled back, my voice ringing in the empty corridors.

  “It’s gorgeous here,” he said. “I’ve been outside working all day. No shirt. It’s hot as hell. I’m going to convince your mom to go swimming with me tonight, take a bottle of wine, maybe the old rope swing down off the bridge.”

  “Daddy,” I said, seeing in my mind my father in his jean shorts, the long, sickle-shaped scars on his tanned back, white in contrast. I couldn’t imagine it was safe. “You shouldn’t be swimming,” I said.

  “Oh, is that right?” he said angrily.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Please.”

  There was a pause. I listened to him breathe, his breath rasping and catching. I remembered Sister Corrina’s breath on my cheek, my collarbone. Her kiss. The tip of her tongue.

  “For God’s sake, what should I do?” he said. “Huh? What should I do?”

  “I miss you,” I said.

  I could sense him fuming on the other end of the line.

  “So, how’s that baby doing?” he asked, his voice suddenly full of a strange, unsettling cheer. He almost never asked about the baby. Never. He’d ask how I was feeling, how Billy was bearing up, but not how the baby was. Sometimes I assumed my father didn’t ask about the baby because it caused him pain to imagine not witnessing his grandchild’s first steps or ever hearing himself called “Grandpa,” other times I feared he just couldn’t care anymore, that all this was for naught.

  I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to confess that relinquishing the luxury of simply being his daughter and taking up the yoke of motherhood was horrifying to me. That giving life meant little in the face of losing him.

  “What’s the due date, again?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about the baby. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What are you talking about, honey?”

  “I came here to pray, to do something, I don’t know what…” I stammered. I was afraid I was going to start crying.

  “I never asked you to pray for me, honey,” he said. “Forget about it. Listen, I know you love
me,” he said. “Do me a favor, would you? Enjoy yourself. Take a swim.”

  “I miss you,” I said again, this time quieter.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “It’s settled.”

  Had I not been starving, I would have stayed in my room, alternately forcing myself to kneel by my bedside, wallowing in guilt and confusion, and stalking back and forth across the room in a dizzying prickly state of desire, unlike any I’d ever experienced—lying down was just an invitation to fantasize about Corrina, slip my hand into my panties, and I didn’t want to. No, I wanted to. I couldn’t.

  Thankfully, I was ravenous. The baby was ravenous. I had to eat. As I approached the dining table, my fellow pilgrims’ faces belied nothing sinister or suspicious. Their expressions were masks of peace, as though they’d been rolling in spiritual clover all day. Now they were eating roast beef with baby carrots and parslied potatoes and chewing with somber, bovine placidity. I envied them, and I hated them. I knew they wondered why I was slipping off into the basement with Sister Corrina, why I hadn’t attended any services today, although God knows I should have.

  I had betrayed my husband.

  As I ate, I tried to ignore their stares. I gobbled my food, barely able to catch my breath between bites, and the pilgrims perched nervously on the edge of their chairs, as if ready to bolt, their watery blue eyes widening in horror as I devoured roll after roll wet with butter. Afraid, no doubt, I’d snatch their pudding, or lick their plates. I was voracious. Clearly, nothing was safe around me.

  All that anchored me was my migraine, which had come back. My head throbbed in a comforting, strangely pleasant way, a sliver of pain right through my left eye, causing the occasional roman candle of white light to appear in the corner of my vision. A divine intervention.

  Later that evening, sitting on the edge of my bed, undressing for sleep, I imagined standing on the creek bank watching my father swim in the dark. I watched him disappear underwater, his body invisible to me, then, just as I began to get frightened, just as I was about to dive in after him, I watched him reappear, suddenly breaking through the water, gasping.