The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  “I’m going to give you a prescription for some stomach medication too,” she says. “Not sleeping can cause acid to accumulate in your stomach and a great deal of pain. If it doesn’t work, come back to see me in a couple of days. OK?”

  She doesn’t manage her own pharmacy in the convent, so I will have to venture out to fill the prescription at the drugstore a few blocks away. Since it’s open all night, I could wait it out until I really need the pills, but I’d cause far too much suspicion. Better to fill them as prescribed and not take them. I wonder what the side effects are. I am afraid the pills will give me more nightmares. I slide my habit back over my underwear and emerge from behind the curtain. Sister Ursula hands me the slip from her prescription pad with her coded writing on it.

  “Do you think those kids were evil?” I ask her.

  Sister Ursula places two fingers tentatively over her lips as if afraid of what she might say. She turns towards the window where frost has formed a pattern on the bottom of the glass. The winter light beaming in strikes her face and she squints. A butterfly is trapped between the glass and the screen. An orange monarch. I wonder if Sister Ursula has noticed. It must be dead.

  “I don’t know,” she says hesitantly, cupping her hands together as if in prayer. Her blue eyes glaze over. “I think what they did was evil.”

  “But were they evil?” I am fully dressed now and relieved to be less vulnerable, to have my body to myself, but am not ready to leave Sister Ursula just yet. The thirst for a direct conversation overwhelms my desire to hide.

  “They were children. I’m not sure they knew what they were doing.” She places her stethoscope on her desk and picks up my chart, reading it over a final time before filing it inside a larger folder.

  “They were teenagers. They kept a diary.”

  I can’t believe I’m arguing with her over this. Especially when it’s clear she isn’t being evasive; she’s unsure what to think about their souls. She doesn’t want to damn them eternally, but she can’t bear to suggest mercy either. I apologize. As Sister Ursula shuffles around searching for her appointment book, crossing off my name and taking a seat at her desk littered with stacks of papers, medical periodicals, latex gloves, and Kleenex, I lace up my shoes to get out of her way and thank her as I leave. Sister Humilita, who I hear is having problems with her bladder, is outside the door waiting her turn. I give over my place, take my prescription to be filled.

  NO ONE EXPECTED HER to go through with it. You should understand that. No one expected her to comply. We thought she would cry and leave at the mention of the idea. We didn’t expect it to grow the way it did, like weeds in a field, out of our hands and hungry.

  Bella arrived on time. She had been told to be at Rachel’s room by eight, after dinner, and Caroline, Francine, and I met a half-hour earlier. I was beginning to have doubts, and I could tell at least Francine did too. She sat on Rachel’s bed, kicking her legs periodically, glancing at the clock. Caroline and Rachel spread out one of Rachel’s mother’s crocheted creations, a pale yellow afghan, on the floor, a makeshift mat for us all to sit on. They talked about Bella.

  “Where should we seat her, in the middle? Or would that be too obvious?” Rachel asked.

  “Non, seat her in the middle where we can all look at her from the corners. We can place the candle beside her.” Caroline liked organizing; she enjoyed being next-in-command to Rachel in our ranks, sizing up the room as if it were a stage.

  The candle holder was meant for ambience. It wasn’t meant to be involved at all. But when Bella arrived, offering up tiny white chocolates as a gift, her hair tied up in a bun, her dark eyes expanding with curiosity, and her slim body taut as a string, Rachel was caught off guard.

  The chocolate turned soft in my hands, and Francine stuffed three straight into her mouth so she wouldn’t have to speak. I too didn’t want to speak, hoping to leave everything up to Rachel and Caroline, but I wasn’t that lucky.

  “We decided we needed a singer in our group,” Rachel began, motioning for Bella to sit and for Caroline to turn off the light.

  The darkness was stifling for a moment, and I could have sworn there was pressure on my shoulder. Who has come for you? I heard, the way I heard things in dreams, unable to make out anything in front of me, or behind me, the formless ache of a body, taking up space, pushing me against walls and bedposts and trees. The same voice I heard as my mother was taken away from me in the dreams, unapologetic and cool. A male voice from the far reaches of the sky, taking away the people I loved. A match was lit, and Rachel’s silver candle holder warmed the centre of the room, made our faces pale and hazy.

  “I think I know what that one is,” Bella said, pointing to an engraving, a circular drawing on the side of the candle holder closest to her, a curled creature. “It’s called an ouroboros. It eats its own tail.”

  “That’s gross,” Caroline retorted, rolling her eyes in my direction. I bent my head to take a closer look, and the figure did look as if it were killing itself.

  “Why does it do that?” I asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Bella said, shrugging her shoulders. “My mother told me about it when we were reading a book on myths together. But the book didn’t say why they do it.”

  “You mean you don’t know everything?” Francine teased, her cheek still swollen with chocolate.

  Bella’s smile vanished while ours grew. Francine and Rachel were pleased Bella didn’t know much about the etchings on the exotic candle holder. Her face was downcast, veiled by darkness as the light moved away from her, the wind from the open window changing the flame’s direction.

  Bella had made an effort to look nice. She wore a clear gloss on her lips and had carefully curled a few hairs outside her bun in the direction of her chin. A tiny blue beaded chain was woven around her neck. She had shown it to me earlier in the day, asking if I liked it. She wanted to wear it to the meeting. “I’m excited,” she said, gently tucking the necklace into a velvet sachet. “It’s my first time, you know.”

  I did know. Bella worked so hard on her studies that she rarely entered our adolescent world. You could catch her light on after hours, but not for the purposes of reading comic books or writing letters to put in the wall outside, but because she was practising her spelling or calculating math problems. She attended the school tea parties and birthday dinners, chatting and eating like the rest of us, but she didn’t seem to know any of the girls. Outside her room, you could almost always hear her humming in anticipation of choir practice. I was starting to feel bad for what we were about to put her through, humiliation she didn’t deserve; but another force held me back from warning her.

  “We are The Sisterhood,” Rachel began, her voice low in a mock-incantation. “We may be small, but we are a powerful group.”

  Francine laughed, her mouth now free of chocolates, her teeth glowing under the light. Caroline shushed her. Bella’s lips began to tremble. She seemed caught between our legs on the blanket, as in a net.

  “Would you like to join us?” Rachel continued.

  “Yes,” Bella responded after a pause. Her arm began to rise, as if she wanted to ask a question like she would in class, but quickly returned to massaging her knees.

  “Well, before you join us, you must pass an initiation.” Rachel stretched out the syllables in the word Initiation as if it might, like the engravings on the candle holder, intimate a secret power. Then she turned to me.

  “Angela will tell you the rest.”

  I was taken aback. I had no idea it would be me who would be forced to ask the questions, give explanations, that I would be the one Bella would despise for tricking and scaring her. I started coughing, my hands waving in front of the candle, pretending the smoke was aggravating me, blinking my eyes. Bella stared at me intently, her lips parted. I couldn’t leave or I was sure I would be teased, maybe kicked out of the group. I had agreed to the plan, after all. Did it matter who carried it out?

  “Are you . . .” I
said after a few deep breaths, “are you a virgin?”

  Bella made as if to answer, her face angled quizzically towards Rachel, her mouth open.

  Francine, Caroline, and Rachel were biting their lips, stifling a few giggles. I couldn’t speak and Bella wouldn’t answer. Francine’s blue eyes shone like wet stones in front of me, and I could hear Caroline swallowing the dryness in her mouth. The few pictures Rachel had taped to her walls, movie posters her father had given her, appeared living, part of our gathering. A young man in military uniform with a gun at his side, if stripped of his garb and manly occupation, could have passed for a girl, it occurred to me, his face curved and feminine, the delicate features incongruous with real warfare but exploited under the bright lights of the theatre.

  Rachel might have tried to stop what was about to happen. I’m not sure. There was obvious dread in the room, and she began to rise, I remember, to snuff out the candle and perhaps pretend the whole thing was a jest, which it was. It was supposed to be. My left hand poking through a triangular hole in the afghan, I was reminded of Rachel’s mother at her birthday party, incoherent and disorderly. And then my own mother, who slept in the dark with her hands across her burning eyes, a blanket up to her chin, her rosary curled like a cuff around her wrist. Nothing was fair, I decided. Nothing about any of this was fair.

  “I said,” I repeated strongly. “Are you still a virgin?”

  Bella shifted uncomfortably, her left hand reaching up and fiddling with the tiny blue beads on her new necklace, sweat shining on her forehead over the flame.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously, her voice barely a whisper. “Aren’t you?”

  “No, none of us are virgins any more.” I nodded to the three corners of the afghan for the other girls to return their assent. They did, like puppets, their movements exaggerated and quick. My voice took on a strength I’d never felt before, as if I were a teacher left in charge and demanding obedience to the rules.

  “You can’t join if you are one,” I stated blankly, and Bella began rubbing her face the way an animal does when it’s cleaning its fur. She wasn’t even looking in my direction any more.

  “But, I . . . I don’t want to yet. I don’t understand,” she mustered as she continued to rub her face and pull some dark strands of her hair in front of her eyes.

  This was when Bella was supposed to make her exit, and we were to laugh. She’d be humiliated and we for once would triumph. Instead there was silence and Bella started to shake uncontrollably, her tongue edging in and out of her mouth as though parched. The silver candle holder wobbled as her leg shook against it, and she grabbed at it with her hand, close to the base, so the blanket wouldn’t catch fire. A liquid stream of wax hit and solidified on the fabric. Bella’s face turned red and the few tiny moles on her cheeks stood out markedly. My own heart was racing with a cultivated sense of fate.

  Rachel was scratching the blanket, irritated the afghan wouldn’t shed the wax, and Francine’s hands groped across the carpet behind her, searching for stray chocolates. Francine’s nervousness often resulted in her filling her mouth, whether with food or fingers or the ends of pencils. Soon she had a thick strand of her own red hair secured between her lips, and the soft noises of her sucking gave me a strange feeling of nostalgia to be Christine’s age again. It was an odd sensation, that I was older than I was—older than these girls on the blanket. Maybe it was my fault I was left alone at St. X. School for Girls, I thought in that room. Maybe I was different, less deserving. Maybe I would be lost in the shuffle of Last Judgement, the way I always fell behind the rest of the girls when we walked through the city in a group. I had no voice. Would they abandon me too? Make me an eternal orphan? As I concentrated on the silver candle holder, the ouroboros closed its tired jaw.

  “You don’t have to do it with a boy. You just have to lose . . . the . . . skin. The skin that separates a woman from a girl.” I spoke the last part hurriedly, unsure if it were true, only sure I wanted to appear knowledgeable about these things, to shock Bella.

  I don’t know why no one contradicted me. Rachel, Caroline, and Francine didn’t budge. This wasn’t part of the plan. I was supposed to tell Bella she’d have to lose her virginity to enter our club, knowing she wouldn’t, and then we were to burst into laughter and she would know we had been kidding, that she hadn’t been truly invited to join our club after all. I had no one else to blame now except myself. I don’t know why I lied, but I set the shadows in motion.

  Bella lifted her head. The skin on her cheeks and the tip of her nose was still red. Shocked yet unhurt, she was listening. Rachel was sitting on her hands, the tips purplish, and Caroline held one edge of the blanket in her fist, kneading it with her bony fingers. I gestured, unbelievingly, to the silver candle holder.

  “You could use the candle holder. It’s the right size, right Rachel?”

  All heads turned to Rachel, who nodded assent, but I was sure, since she had been with Patrick, she would say the candle holder was probably much larger than a boy. Then we all eyed the object in question, judging its suitability for ourselves: the cold steel, the large base and small tip, the many carved ridges. I still expected Bella to leave. It was just a game. I was about to withdraw my comments, apologize for them in the morning, the candle holder sitting in judgement before me, the heat in the room claustrophobic, when Bella’s voice, weaker than I’d ever heard it, said, “OK.”

  I was amazed and torn. I wanted to see what would happen to Bella but I didn’t want to either. I had no idea whether it would work or not, or what it would mean to Bella to have her virginity snatched away from her. But curiosity won out over mercy. None of us realized Bella might be permanently harmed. Rachel took the candle, which had been burning in the shaft of the candle holder, and carried it to her dresser, where it momentarily illuminated her father’s photograph. She turned the frame towards the wall, and lit a tea-candle instead. She didn’t mind her father seeing her with Patrick, but not a girl by herself? I wondered. Perhaps she hadn’t thought of him watching her from behind the glass until then. It was the only indication I ever had that Rachel might have been as afraid of ghosts as I was.

  Caroline, Francine, and me, as I was now permitted to retreat into the shadows, sat on the bed, while Bella stood in the centre of the blanket. The yellow patch on the carpet resembled dead grass fried by a sweltering summer. Bella untucked her blouse, the white folds flattened against her skin with sweat. Her skirt remained around her waist though she hiked it up, extending her thighs to catch the material. She slipped off her underwear. They were pink, I remember, pink like her fingertips, pink like the sugared candies shaped into hearts we bought for pennies at Woolworth’s. She squatted and Rachel, once she had rubbed the wax off as much as she could, placed the candle holder on the floor between her legs and joined us on the bed. From our angle, it almost looked as if Bella were trying to find a position in which to urinate, her skirt in front of her, hiding in her modesty. Caroline sought my hand and I held on, pleading to myself over and over in my head: Who has come for you? Who has come for you? Who has come for you? I couldn’t believe it was us.

  She bore down upon it quickly. Bella moaned with pain, the suffering evident in her creased forehead alone enough to make me afraid for her. Her knees on the floor, her thighs closed around the base of the candle holder. Spots of red on yellow. Hands clenched against the bottom of her ribs, attempting to dislodge the foreign object. Her teeth clipping her bottom lip leaked a tiny trail of blood to her chin. She was still squatting, her face quivering as if in prayer towards the ceiling, wet clear snot cradled under her nose, in the space above her upper lip. She was still beautiful, if crumpled, her body slouched and surviving like a flower in a rainstorm. Black shadows from the candlelight moved over her like clouds, her face white as sheet lightning.

  Rachel crouched before her. Bella fell against her and Rachel held her in her arms. The candle holder was still inside Bella, her body stuck to it, glistening with blood, red-bla
ck blood in patches over her legs. Finally, Rachel managed to balance Bella. She removed her hands from Bella’s waist and grabbed the base of the protruding candle holder. I heard muffled noises from Caroline, who stuffed her face into Rachel’s pillow, screaming into the feathers. Rachel cried out when she pulled, as if the object had been lodged inside her instead. They both fell against the floor. In the yellow haze, it was difficult to tell which girl was on top.

  The candle holder lay discarded and stained beside them. Francine got up, her face pale, and stumbled out of the room, almost kicking Rachel and Bella on the way. Caroline was alone with her muffled screams; Rachel and Bella had become entwined like lovers. I was alone. There was no comfort for me.

  When Rachel’s face emerged out of Bella’s embrace, it too had blood on it—an imprint on her forehead and on her blouse in the space between her breasts. Her cheeks looked chubby, bloated. Bella was curled in a ball on the floor, her hair falling out of the bobby pins, strands of black spilling from her bun, plastered to her face, her neck. Her hands pressed against her belly.

  Rachel could barely speak. “Help me. God, help me,” she begged through tears.

  I knew we would see better if I turned on the light, but I didn’t want to draw attention to Rachel’s room. I didn’t want to see Bella, not really see her, to be able to tell how bad it was. God help us, I echoed. It was the first time I’d uttered a sincere prayer within the walls of the school. Leaving Caroline on the bed, I slid to the floor and crawled over to Rachel, who was stroking Bella’s hair reverently on her lap.

  THERE ARE NO SUICIDES in a convent. Even now, when abortions are legal, handled by legitimate medical professionals, and where one can give power of attorney to family members to pull the plug on hospital machines, there is no such thing within our walls as a suicide. It is a sin, and the stains of sin, as Sister Marguerite would have called them, are not welcome here. The soul must be free of its own murder.