The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do . . . when I leave here.” Her hand lingers on the oak wood of the dresser.

  “That’s good. It’s about time you made plans.”

  She takes her scolding well, nodding submissively. “I just still can’t decide anything. I don’t know where I should go or if I should keep the baby. I don’t want to be another mother on welfare who does nothing and is nobody.”

  “Don’t you think that’s going to depend on you?” I ask her. “I mean, that’s why welfare’s there—if you need it.”

  “But I don’t want to take welfare,” she says, covering her face with her hands and starting to sob. “I don’t want to bring up a kid and just be poor. Just get by. I don’t want to have to do it by myself.”

  Kim lifts her head and stares at the wall behind my dresser as if it were a mirror. She has begun to envision her future. It isn’t a bright one, and I don’t know if I should contradict her. She’s fifteen, after all, and if she does keep her baby, what would she be able to offer him or her? The kind of life she doesn’t want and it will resent, most probably. A life of counting pennies, of hardship, of hunger. Without an education, what would she be able to do? I cannot speak of these things with her, because suffering and poverty are accepted virtues within our walls. Yet, the only reason Mr. Q. hasn’t forced her into school is because her parents don’t want her back and Sister Ursula recommended she stay out until the end of her term. But what then? Certainly mothers have brought up children at sixteen before, but in today’s age? Without a man? She’s close enough to sixteen she won’t be forced to give it away. She needs to decide.

  “You could give it up,” I say softly.

  She shakes her head and turns around, meeting my eyes as I slide my hips to the end of the bed to give her room if she wants to sit. Her cheeks are wet, her olive face flushed pink. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t bring it into this world if I’m not going to take care of it. I can’t.”

  “Then what, dear?”

  She hoists her arms up over her head, her hands in two tight fists in a motion to bear down upon her belly. They fall like hammers. I let out a cry just as her fingers unravel before striking her own flesh.

  She collapses on the bed and forces herself into my embrace. I hug her tightly, yet try not to apply too much pressure, not wishing to harm the baby, as I believed she wished to harm it. I know from my own teenage years that girls get ideas into their heads in such situations. Ride bicycles or use turkey basters, jump down flights of stairs or drink bottles of whisky. She’s probably heard of other ways. She may be seven months pregnant and the clinics won’t take her, but someone will. There’s always someone willing to say they’ll save you.

  “Listen to me,” I say, my voice cracking, unable to hold back the sorrow within me. “You can’t do that. You can’t think like that. You need to be brave.”

  I want to cup her jaw in my hands, force her to listen. She folds in my arms, the lingering smell of her morning shampoo in my face. I curl my hands around her until she decides to break free.

  “I’m so sorry,” she cries. “I’m so sorry. You’re not feeling well and I shouldn’t be here.”

  She’s being sincere and I wonder how awful I must look to make her afraid for my health in her own distress. She must have heard about the wine from one of the Sisters. Maybe even Sister Ursula. I grip her wrists with my hands. They are delicate, like twigs. Her eyes, a muddy brown, are deeply set, the bottom rims edged with a row of tears.

  “I hate my baby. I hate it. I wish it wasn’t going to be born.”

  “Don’t say that,” I say strongly. “Don’t you dare curse a life like that.”

  She tries to rise from the bed, but I hold her with the little strength I have left. My whole head is pounding and the room has turned into a cave, where we have little light and only each other.

  “You see, Kim,” I begin as she calms enough to listen to me and fumbles in her shirt pocket to produce a tissue. “I’ve been upset because of an anniversary. An anniversary of someone’s death.”

  I cannot continue. The words stick like hair in a drain. Refuse to be extracted.

  “Your mother?”

  “My mother? No, not my mother. Not just my mother.” But I’m surprised she knows. The Sisters have shared more with her than I imagined. I didn’t even realize they knew the depth of that grief in me. I didn’t know they thought it worthy of mention. For a few years after entering the convent, I could been seen crying on her birthday and on the anniversary of her death, but after that my grief was bound to this room, within these walls, where I believed no one could hear me. Has anyone been down here listening? Visiting my mother’s grave once a year ought not to cause this kind of talk. But then there was Christine’s visit, and they must know it will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of my mother’s death soon. Our faith is big on anniversaries. Our faith is also big on suffering. And I know since I’ve spent nights with my ear pressed against the doors of other rooms, I shouldn’t assume no one has listened at mine. Maybe Kim herself has. She doesn’t make much noise when she walks and likes to go about in bare feet. Last week, when the air was warmer, I saw them outside my window. Square toes, blunt. The wet snow between them.

  Kim is a sponge here, collecting information, but she can’t know what fits where, how to put things into a pattern. No wonder she’s confused. We pull at her in different directions, each trying to mould her into our own individual vision of the future. She can’t make decisions and many don’t want her to. If we all admitted it, that’s what we’d find. No one truly wants her to help herself. We want to do the helping. It is the cornerstone of our profession. We need to be needed.

  “No, a friend. A girl I knew when I was young. She was your age.” I can’t bear the holes in her cardigan. The girl is practically an orphan, I think. She’s got nothing. She folds the tissue into square sections, keeping her face away from mine. I watch her movements from underneath a veil of approaching tears. The small orders of our lives.

  It is my turn to collapse against her. And we cling to each other, her hands pulling on the material of my habit, me pushing against her neck with my shoulder blade. I can feel her whimpering breath and the skin of her cheek against my own. And it feels good to cry. I can vaguely make out the picture of Christine and me on her wedding day, the restaurant filled with clinking glasses, sisters sharing a moment together amidst the celebration. Two women who can rarely manage to spend an hour together without feeling miserable. The picture is where my eyes rest, regardless. Pulled to her. The candle holder momentarily out of sight. Christine’s warm smile and turquoise wrap shine in my direction. I do miss her. I’ve missed her for years. Kim is young and scared. And though I’ve lived longer, I’m right here with her.

  MY FATHER INTERROGATED THE nurses on night duty in my mother’s wing, the doctor who had admitted her to the Children’s Hospital, and the new specialist, a recently acclaimed ground-breaker in degenerative disorders. He generally worked only on children, but decided to take on my mother’s case as it was so unique. The Children’s Hospital, being brand new in Ottawa, was equipped with the latest technology, and my mother was given her own room in a research wing without many children. My father gathered up the facts of that night and held onto them with a confused but submissive complacency. The few facts were that she had previously been seen by the said specialist and complained of pain in her hands and trouble sleeping. This was in the afternoon, and later she was observed by an intern in the common room watching television. She asked a nurse to wheel her into her room, the wheel-chair an apparatus provided for her over the last two weeks to help her manoeuvre around the hospital and for moral support, so she could attempt to make it to the washroom by herself instead of having to rely on the nurse or her bedpans. Her eyes were sore and she kept her rose-coloured glasses on, despite the doctor’s optimistic prediction that she would soon be able to discard them and rely on specially prescribed bifocals. The
operation had gone well, the healing around the lids improved by creams and drops over the last week, only her left eye covered with a bandage and patch to keep foreign matter from causing infection. Medical attention was now being concentrated on her dwindled muscles, her flesh grinding into bone at an astonishingly quick rate. After eating unsalted soup for dinner, she had been given her dose of night medication by the nurse on duty, one my father knew by first name and could recognize. The doctor had raised her sleeping pill dose by a slim margin to ensure she received the rest necessary to stabilize her condition. The two nurses on duty in her wing remembered nothing abnormal occurring, and they swore to their own alertness, corroborated by a few teenage patients who rang their buzzers in the night. When the morning nurse came by my mother’s room early to take blood tests and dispose of urine bags, she found my mother’s bed empty. The other nurses and the resident doctors on duty were immediately notified. They searched the wing first, the common room and the visiting lobby, the washrooms and the employee lunch room, expecting to find that she had fallen asleep after seeking out a snack or water. Then they searched the rest of the floor, the cafeteria, and the gift shop on the ground floor. They paged her over the PA system; they left messages with her doctors. Then they called the police. The hospital, my father was told, was officially shocked and bewildered and unable to uncover any concrete evidence of what had ensued on the night of the worst snowstorm of the season. It made no sense. How a woman drowsy and disoriented on painkillers and sleeping pills, who had just had an eye operation and had lost the workings of the lower half of her body, had passed completely undetected by staff or patients, and had walked through the snow more than five hundred feet in her hospital robe, was mind-boggling. If the event hadn’t ended so tragically, her doctor said, they would have called it a miracle.

  My mother was discovered beside the fountain. Not by the police or by hospital staff, but by a middle-aged man who had brought in his nephew with a case of seafood poisoning to Emergency. As he aided his nephew back to his car after the doctor confirmed he would be fine with some rest, the early light of dawn striking the new snow with blinding intensity, he thought he saw a half-buried article of clothing, a scarf, most likely lifted off its owner by the winds. He wasn’t going to investigate further. The scarf was simply something he noticed out of the corner of his eye. The parking lot exit would have taken him in a curve in the direction from the fountain, towards a main access road to the highway. The oak trees lining the sides of the road would not have offered him a second view of the piece of clothing. The hospital had been sent a single snow removal truck for the night, to clear a route for ambulances. He had only to follow slowly behind the truck, concentrate on the signs, keep away from the snowbanks. He was cold and tired, and between the door of the hospital and the door of his car, his coffee, bought at the machine in the lobby, had chilled. But as he waited for his car to warm up, the pale-blue cloth waving in the wind like a flag nagged at him, the implication dawning that something must be weighing it down.

  The fountain was built close to the Children’s Hospital, near the separate lodging for parents whose children were being treated indefinitely. Drained of water in the winter, upon the first signs of spring the fountain would be running. Designed with a concrete base a foot and a half deep, it was painted a soft green and used as a wishing well by families and their children. Pennies, dimes, and quarters lay at the bottom, each thrown with the hope of getting well, of getting out of the hospital, of returning to warm beds and school recesses. The water flowed out from rubber tubes attached to the bottom of the statue erected in the middle of the wading pool: a blunt outline of a girl and a boy holding hands, without faces or eyes, two-dimensional as stick figures on paper, a triangular skirt and a curved head with the hint of curls at the shoulder to indicate a girl, and a round head with two rectangular legs to indicate the boy. The hands indistinct, melded together in the middle.

  As the man drew closer, leaving his nephew to rest in the back seat, the notion grew that there might be a child caught in the snow by the fountain. He thought of the children in the hospital and how tempting the fresh snow must look to them, locked up inside. How many hours had it been? He panicked and started to run, his boots sinking into the two feet of snow, its icy crust breaking into clumps, spilling into his boots. It is difficult to run after a snowstorm when the winds are still strong. The air has weight and the coldness burns in the throat, practically bleeds through the lungs. The man was sweating profusely by the time he reached the pale-blue cloth furiously beaten by the wind.

  There was definitely a form beneath the snow. He brushed off the top surface and began to dig at the surrounding ice. My mother was kneeling in the snow, prostrate, her fingertips closed together in a V around her face, thumbs frozen against her cheeks. He still believed it was a child he was collecting, her head freed of her wig, small tufts of brown hair around her ears and the back of her neck. The skin was laced a whitish-blue, similar to the hue of the cloth, which made him wipe his eyes, thinking his mind must be playing tricks on him. When he dug deeper and brushed away more snow, he saw the wrinkles on her hands, her face. What protruded was a larger form than he had supposed. Her breasts shrivelled into drained sacks, he did not know he had found a woman until he had fully dug a ring around her. The cloth was her hospital gown, which had risen in the night. She was bare and exposed, hairless between her thighs as well. He had no thoughts about how she had gotten there, only that he must get her out, digging and digging with his hands, alternately crying out and jumping, waving to attract the attention of anyone moving by in a car, the ambulance attendants by the entrance, or a patient gazing out the window.

  He took off his coat and wrapped it around my mother, hanging the material off her shoulders as he did not wish to disturb her pose, afraid he might break one of her bones, his purpose to try and warm up her body. Poor man, poor Samaritan. Pulling her gently out of her white grave. He cradled her with his arms, lifted his eyes to heaven. When no one answered his shouts, he hoisted her up all along praying for her delivery. She was already dead. Her spirit had drifted in the night with the snow.

  It is hard for me to envision him otherwise, the man who found my mother and attended her funeral, who finally managed to attract the attention of the ambulance driver and a doctor and two nurses who were working on that shift, who held my mother’s back against his chest, her icy legs across his elbows, making the upper half of his body into a moving chair. A perfect stranger. The man who thought he was saving a child, but didn’t turn away or feel less rage when he knew she was a woman. Knew deep in his heart she was already dead. There was nothing left to do except notify the family, if she had one. I imagine him perplexed by her pose, up-rooted from the ground itself, her bones making a statue of her pain. Imagine the ground crying out as he set her free.

  He came to the visitation with a bouquet of flowers, his wife waiting nervously in the background, uncomfortable in the presence of grieving strangers. But he had felt compelled to come, pay his respects and deliver a message. Like an angel, he came professing faith, said to my father as he shook his hands: “I came to tell you her face was serene. She did not look afraid. Not afraid at all.” My father, holding onto his hands as if they were buoys in turbulent water, nodded in agreement. “She’s made me think there is a place for us, after all this. There must be. She was praying. And she was not afraid.” When he approached Christine and me on the cushioned bench between my father and Aunt Heather, he shook our timid hands as well, said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to save her. Christine ran into his arms and hugged him, and his wife seemed flustered, coming up behind him and tugging on the back of his coat jacket. I joined him at the coffin when he knelt as a Catholic and crossed himself. They stayed for a quick coffee and left. He held my hand, that man, who from then on believed in a world beyond this one because he believed my mother had been praying peacefully when death arrived. He laid a bouquet of white roses down by the coffin’s
feet as one might at an icon.

  My father, my sister, the doctors—all believe my mother died praying. But I know better. She prayed with her hands in her lap, with her rosary, not with them up at her face where her eyes burned. If she went to the fountain to pray, it wasn’t for peace but for forgiveness. She had a way of knowing things, my mother. About her children. She could be found waiting upset by the door when one of us hadn’t even been late coming in, sure that we had hurt ourselves playing, scratched a knee or bruised an ankle, and we had. I believe she knew what had happened to Bella. If she prayed, she prayed for the children. Children who were playing adults. Children who were going to be judged. I can hear her still, trapped in the walls of my convent room, whispering into my ears as I try to rest. Angela, no, not you, you could not have done that to a child. A child. How could you be so blind? Her hands were held up against her face, I know, because she was shielding her disbelieving eyes.

  The scent of lilies followed our sleepwalking bodies, the sense of smell the only one that refused to be numbed. Lilies in decorative vases, in pots, in wreaths attached to the two ends of the coffin, on the pews of the church, in the entrance of our room at the funeral home, in Mother’s black wig as she lay in her casket, preserved and alone. Mourners commented on the beauty of the arrangements and decorations, on the lovely scents. But we were cornered, molested by their pervading presence. The lilies bloomed, grew, filling up the air with her absence. Their long white faces, undisturbed, flouting us. Their petals smooth and silky. My mother’s face powdered white and pink, her skin frozen in her slumber, a few lilies propped in her stony hands.