God has been using me in amazing ways, Caiden said. I feel called, at times, to say things to people. I don’t know why I’m saying them or what their relevance is, but it ends up being exactly what they need to hear at that precise moment.
Hannah had forgotten what it was like to talk to Caiden. How egotistical he could be. They had never really talked. Maybe it was the age difference. But he’d always seemed more interested in the potent physical effect she had on his body than in anything she might have to say. He liked her wordless, daredevil willingness to try anything – and she liked the electricity his presence sent through her body. But then, there had always been a lot of women.
How’s your wife?
She’s a strong, virtuous woman, he said. Well, she’d have to be to keep a man like me in line. I’ve made love to that woman thousands of times and I’m still not tired of it yet.
He indicated and they turned into a vast parking lot in front of a Walmart.
Remind me to get brownie mix for the boys, he said, and milk.
In the canned goods aisle, as Caiden was taking down a can of chickpeas, his cell phone rang. He said, Okay, honey, whipped cream. I’ll go get it, Hannah said, and as she was walking off, she heard him say, I love you too. A slightly wincing tone. Check up on your husband and use whipped cream as an excuse. That was the Christian way. Appear at all costs to have grace. It made Hannah want to get drunk and swear, make a porn film on the cold linoleum floor of an American box store.
They drove west to a wealthy neighbourhood with houses set so far back off the road they had their street addresses nailed to trees. Flagpoles marking the driveway entrances.
I hate patriotism, Hannah thought, and felt a sudden deep craving to see Norm. They were so compatible. They wanted the same things. There was no desire to emulate the trappings of success. They sought inward, intangible rewards – surges of feeling, intellectual achievements. They liked their rented apartment, the art on the walls they’d made themselves, the duets they sang together, Norm on guitar. They liked the fact they’d never had Cheez Whiz growing up, or juice boxes or store-bought cookies, and how ashamed they’d been by their hand-me-down clothes, and how they’d both had paid jobs by the time they were fifteen and what that did for character. Maybe she could live without a child. There were other considerations.
At the door, Julia was beautiful and ripe with her fourth pregnancy. She was wearing an apron and her hair was shiny brown, her skin glowing. A box of pasta in one hand, her other hand affectionately resting on the back of her son’s neck. Two more boys came around the door, curious and enthusiastic as puppies.
Hi, Julia said in a flat tone, and Hannah understood this visit was a mistake. She suddenly felt like an emblem, a symbol of Caiden’s reform and fidelity, and a concession to forgiveness on Julia’s part. Hannah might as well have sent a cardboard cutout of herself, or a blank screen onto which they could have projected their new better selves, void of those lawless and inappropriate joyful urges.
But just as quickly, Hannah summoned up a generous spirit and held out her hand, and Julia shook it politely. Then Hannah said to the children, Okay, which one of you is the troublemaker.
It was five-thirty in the afternoon when Rose arrived in Wichita. She’d made two flight connections and been travelling for nearly ten hours. She walked out past the baggage claim to where people were being met by their families and friends. A child ran into the arms of a joyous grandparent. Two young people embraced, his hand inside the back of her sweater, an exposed crescent of pale skin. Rose felt tired and hungry. She stood beside her compact wheelie suitcase and felt like a fool. What was she doing here, really? She should never have let Tim convince her. Now she was dreading calling her daughters. And how was Zeus going to feel? She had to get a cab, and to book a room near the church. Off to her left was an airport bar and grill – first things first. She wheeled her suitcase over and sat down in a dark booth and ordered a porter house steak and a glass of red wine.
What was she expecting to accomplish by making this surprise appearance? She told the waitress she was stressed. I just flew out to drop in on my kids unannounced.
The waitress gave a quick snort and said, Oh, they’re gonna love that! Well, maybe your family is different, I don’t know. You want a baked potato or french fries?
Rose was humiliated. Fries, please. If she had called them first, what then? Would she even be here? Perhaps she was just caught up in her own needs, after all. Rose picked at her steak and sipped her wine and finished neither of them.
In the taxi, she looked out at the lights of Wichita city, all the young people heading out for a Friday night on the town. Perhaps she was trying to create a little adventure for herself, however selfish she was being. She felt like she’d been looking after people all her life, propping them up behind the scenes. She thought back to when her husband was first ordained and assigned to a parish in Montreal. He was out nearly every evening, attending one meeting or another, visiting elderly or dying parishioners in the hospital, rushing off to help a poor family being evicted or immigrants in a panic because they couldn’t read their utility bills. They had met so many people, their stories so compelling. There was that drug dealer, Teddy, who’d grown up Hassidic but had converted to Christianity. He started bringing his associates to prayer meetings at the church. They’d take a seat in the sidechapel and their pants would slide up past their ankle boots to reveal the butt of a gun or the handle of a knife. Rose had had to ask Tim to talk to them about their hardware. He made a gentle request, and after that, they left their guns and knives in the silver collection tray by the door. Teddy was so fond of Tim he invited him on a fishing trip with his buddies. When Tim fell asleep in the boat, Teddy and his friends hooked a fish to the end of his line, then tugged on it and jostled him awake. Pastor! Pastor! You caught a fish!
But those were hard and exciting times for both of us, Rose thought as the taxi turned off the highway into an industrial section of the city. There was that soup kitchen she’d started in the basement of the church, that took up so much of her time and energy, where she sold secondhand clothes, and taught sewing and cooking classes to single moms. It’s where she’d met that frightening homeless man, Hunter, with whom she found herself doing spiritual battle.
Hunter had a messianic complex and a small following of disciples. One day he walked right into her soup kitchen and tossed the plywood tables into the air. The coffee urn exploded in a brown spume, and a boxful of sugar cubes went scattering across the floor. He tipped over the racks that held the donated clothes she’d so painstakingly cleaned and labelled, then he threw a black taffeta ball gown in her face – the same shiny blue-black as a raven’s feathers. The ball gown seemed to swirl around and engulf her head. He said, I know that your father died of a heart attack four years ago, and that he never approved of you. She’d run to the phone and called the police.
He came back again on a Sunday morning before the service and Tim had to escort him outside. It was in the middle of a snowstorm, and Rose could remember how the snow had swirled around Tim’s black cassock while Hunter towered over him, shouting obscenities. You motherfucking hypocrite! You parasitic dog-fucking son of a whore! It was terrible, but Tim had shown such courage. He’d stood his ground, even bursting into song at one point, belting out ‘Onward Christian Soldier’ at the top of his lungs. It almost seemed funny to her now. But then she recalled that awful vision she’d had of Hunter lifting Tim up by the armpits and throwing him backwards, impaling him on the spiked, wrought-iron fence in front of the church. She’d squeezed her eyes shut and begged God to protect her husband. When she opened them again, Hunter was crossing the street with his hands on his head, like he was being arrested. Twenty minutes later, composed as anything, her husband was leading the morning service. How had he been able to do that? He never complained about a thing. He just went on about his business with a quiet and dignified confidence. He was such a private man, and it meant they neve
r talked about all that stuff.
It was that same year he got possessed by an evil spirit. It was that Ida woman, after a Bible study, complaining about the flowers on the altar. Tim had tried to interrupt her, and then Ida stood up and loomed over him like Hunter had done. She said a few words that Tim could never recall, and a coldness like a grey fog, with a foul sulfuric smell, rose up out of her and swept down onto him and covered him like a lead apron. Ida walked out of the church and Tim struggled to make it from the chapel to his office. This time the girls were there, doing their homework. He collapsed into a chair, pale as a corpse, and told them to call home.
As soon as she heard Connie’s voice, Rose knew something was wrong. She arrived at the church fifteen minutes later and ran into her husband’s empty office. Tim’s watch was on his desk, next to his priest’s collar, his cardigan on the floor. She called out his name and ran back into the cavernous church and down the stairs into the basement. She came around the corner to where the washrooms were. The door to the men’s room was open. Connie and Hannah stood in the bright fluorescent light, in that white tiled room, thirteen and fourteen years old. They looked terrified. The door to one of the stalls was open, and Tim was sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, vomit on the floor, crying like a child. Why had she and Tim never tried to talk to the girls about what they’d witnessed? There hadn’t been any talk about that either. These were the kinds of mistakes she’d go back and fix, if only she could.
Tim stayed in bed for two weeks after that while a procession of priests came and went through the house, sprinkling salt and holy water in all the rooms, even the bishop with his miter and staff. The bishop had a warmth that Rose had appreciated. He was the only one who took the time to ask the girls about school. Eventually, Tim got better. Meningitis was mentioned by a visiting doctor, but everyone knew it was the work of the devil.
The taxi had stopped and she was in front of The Global Kingdom of Salvation Center. It was dark outside. Things didn’t quite look the way she remembered. She was starting to feel anxious again. It was her effort to do the right thing and her insecurity, clanging like gongs against each other. Her hands were cold and clammy. She paid the driver and stepped out onto the sidewalk. She yanked the handle up out of the top of her suitcase. Oh, but it was good to be here again, at this holy place of worship. She’d go inside and ask about accommodation. When she got settled, she’d call the kids. It wasn’t wrong of her to have come, so what if she was nervous. It was probably a healthy sign, a good kind of nervousness, even if it was making it hard for her to breathe. Her breathing was getting shallow. She swung her purse off her shoulder and started digging around in it. Lord, just let me get inside first. Her throat was constricting. Her chest too. Where was her inhaler? Is it possible she’d forgotten to bring it? She had the urge to cough. She unzipped her jacket, hooked her hands around the collar of her sweater and dragged the neck down. Please, Lord, don’t let this happen to me. Not right now. She had begun to wheeze. Two people standing nearby turned to look. Asthma, Rose whispered. She was buried in sand with only a straw to breathe through and starting to panic. The more panicked she felt, the harder it was to get air. Silver spots flared and fizzled in front of her like flakes of magnesium. Dizziness. Oh God, Rose said, and then she passed out on the sidewalk in front of The Global Kingdom of Salvation Center. She went down sideways and didn’t get her hands up in time. She sliced her head on the base of a metal garbage can and lay unconscious on the ground, bleeding from her hair. A small crowd quickly gathered. Someone call an ambulance! a woman shouted and ran into the building.
You okay? It was Zeus. He had walked over to Connie and was crouching beside her chair with his hand on her back. I fell asleep. Do you know what time it is?
It’s late, Connie said, sitting up straight and bending her spine from side to side. She turned to Zeus and looked at him imploringly. Why is the Bible, she said, full of stories about favoured children singled out for greatness, when most of us will never be? There’s this constant feeling of falling short. And a great pressure to conceal it, by keeping up appearances. I know my mother found it very difficult being the wife of a vicar, but talking to her, sometimes, was like talking to someone on TV.
Yeah, but you can’t just tell someone like that to drop the act, Zeus said.
I know, Connie said, because if you persist with it for long enough, the person behind the act just shrivels up from neglect and disappears. They turn to dust – that’s all that’s left. Connie brushed her hair back with both hands. No, that’s wrong, she said, speaking very slowly and deliberately. What’s left is the awful but acceptable murder, of a beautiful if flawed and ambiguous life. I even know how a thing like that starts, I’m just not sure how you stop it.
Connie knew that her mother carried a wound at the heart of the very thing that saved her – her faith in God – because her father had refused to go to her baptism when she was fifteen years old. He thought a church that would deign to baptize his spirited teenaged daughter was a church incapable of wisdom. Rose ached to serve God. She, too, had grown up with the dream of becoming a missionary, like her mother, but her own father thought she was unworthy. It gave Rose a feeling that would infect the rest of her life, that she was a sham Christian. It was the worst blow to her confidence – to be accused of fraudulence when she felt so sincere. Connie knew all this because Rose had told her daughters this story and it had made them so sad, but it was the kind of sadness that drives a wedge into closeness.
When you’re a child and your mother’s sad and you can’t help her, Connie said to Zeus, you have to run away.
I know about running away, he said.
We all did, in our own ways, run away from Rose and Tim. I think that’s why she’s coming now. She knows it too. And this time she wants to make sure we all make it home, wherever that is exactly.
Caiden dropped Hannah off back at the hotel. Before she got out of his SUV, he said, I’m sorry if I was an asshole all those years ago.
You weren’t an asshole, Hannah said.
I mean, all that groping and stuff. I wouldn’t want you to feel like I’d –
Hannah shook her head.
You know, it always surprises me, he said, but the more I get to know you, the more I like you.
Why should that surprise you? Hannah thought. What should have surprised him was how little effort he’d made to get to know her in the first place. Hannah wanted to say that it seemed the opposite for her, that she liked him less, that he would never know her, that she’d played devil’s advocate in the car, had only told him about what wasn’t going well in her life in reaction to his exaggerated claims of personal fulfillment, his smug self-satisfaction. She’d asked him if God had a message for her, seeing as he had this ability, and he’d said that it didn’t work that way. I never ask for it, he said. It just happens. And Hannah looked out the window, annoyed at herself for having fallen for it in the first place, having caved into her curiosity.
Now, standing on the curb, she felt a quick, ferocious gallop of disappointment. She’d wanted Caiden to say that he was still in love with her, would always be, though there was nothing to be done about it now. That would have redeemed everything. To make exuberant desire the cause of his behaviour, not turn it into something depraved. That’s what sullied the memory. It was the idea of sin. She’d had no regrets about it until now. Until now, the memory was pure. She’d been irresistible to Caiden. She’d had that power over him, but now he’d taken that away from her by apologizing and turning his desire into a weakness. Desire wasn’t shameful. It was Jesus who made sinners of us all.
Hannah watched Caiden drive away, then covered her mouth. An overwhelming need to cry was coming to the surface. She moved away from the hotel entrance. All through dinner, she’d been repressing this sad, new, painful knowledge that had revealed itself to her, that he’d never really loved her. She walked around behind the building and stood beside a dumpster, put her hands on her k
nees, bent forward and sobbed. It was more like vomiting than crying, and it passed soon enough, and afterwards she felt purged.
In the lobby, Hannah spotted a payphone, went over, shoved her credit card in the slot, and dialled her number in Toronto. Norm was home.
I’m sorry about our last phone call, he said.
Me too, she said. I miss you.
Hannah told Norm about arriving here, the church, and how Zeus had stayed with her sister and gone in. She could see Norm shaking his head with that knowing grin of his. I think I’ve realized something on this trip, she said.
What, an epiphany? Norm said. On the road to Damascus?
I’m happy with you, Norm.
I’m glad to hear that, he said.
We’re sort of made for each other, don’t you think? I don’t want to be with anybody else.
I love you too, Hansky Polansky.
I know you do, she said. And that’s the funny thing. I’ve never really felt that with anyone before, or believed it, or trusted it, or whatever. And I don’t question it with you. Let’s just be with each other and see how things turn out, okay?
You know, we’re going to be all right, he said, you and I.
When she got up to the room, Zeus was unpacking. Thanks for bringing our bags up from the truck, he said, and Connie came out of the bathroom holding two glasses of water.
So how was dinner with Caiden Brock? Connie said, her tone full of innuendo. That was fast.
Can you give it a rest?
Sorry, she said, putting the glasses down on the bedside table. How’d it go? Connie was taking off her sweater. Seriously, she said.
Sweet Jesus Page 20