The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  Sometimes her mother did not come downstairs. Once, when the day had stretched on into the fading light of the afternoon without her mother’s appearance, she tired of flipping through comic books and shuffling around the porcelain ladies. In the drifting shadows of the living room, the antique dolls seemed to stare at her, their white-ringed eyes leering.

  She crept upstairs and slipped through the bedroom door. Her mother was sprawled in her bathrobe on top of the covers, one long, lovely leg hanging off the edge with a carelessness that she never seemed to have when awake. Her red hair was a frizzy mess around her face, one hand manicured with dark red polish, the other bare. She had laid out her clothes on the chair the way she often did before showering. Nicole crept closer. The skin under her nose tightened. A strange air hung in the room: a glass with a rime of golden liquid on the dresser, a staticky radio turned low, with an old Billie Holiday song playing that sounded like sobbing. In my solitude . . .

  She shook her mother’s shoulder, and her mother yanked her arm roughly back, snarling, “Get—the fuck away from me!”

  She ran, flying downstairs, huddling behind the couch. Now the safety of the house seemed to throb with danger, and her mother’s voice—no voice she knew—rushed like blood in her ears. The dolls on their shelf glared balefully at her, and she flung them into the hall.

  She was still there when the kitchen door opened and Paul returned from school, calling cheerfully; she listened to the thump of his backpack on the floor, the rasp of his shoes on the mat, from far away. She saw him stop at the thrown dolls. Then he was standing over her. “Hey. You all right?”

  She didn’t answer. After a moment, he went upstairs and seemed to know what was happening, because when he came down again, he was holding out her coat. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  They didn’t go far, she remembered; they just walked down the hill to the ice cream parlor, where he counted out whatever pocket change he had so they could get a cone. He held her hand when they crossed a street, even though she knew it must embarrass him to be seen this way, holding his little sister’s hand. They walked back up the hill slowly, their steps getting slower the closer they got to home. She dared a look up at him and studied the clenched boyish line of his jaw. “Why is she like that?”

  “She just is sometimes,” he said.

  “But why?”

  He paused, huffing a little at the climb. “I don’t know. She gets depressed. She told me once that she feels like she’s wearing a heavy coat that she can’t take off.”

  Nicole nodded, struggling to figure it out, to file this away for future understanding. Paul sat on a neighbor’s brick garden wall, still not looking at her. “She’s good at hiding it,” he said. “For years. The last bad time was when you were little. You wouldn’t remember.” His jaw worked. “Just stay away from her when she’s like that.”

  She nodded, sniffing a little, and he put his arm around her. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

  She felt a fierce swell of pride: Paul was already in high school, never around when kids pushed her in the schoolyard or strange dogs barked at her from behind fences. But he always wanted to protect her.

  When they crept back into the house, Paul grabbed the antique dolls and shoved them under his coat. “I’ve always hated these things,” he said. “Come on.”

  They snuck around the back, and with a garden trowel he dug a small hole behind the wild mint growing scraggly and untended at one end of the yard. They buried the dolls there, solemnly and with great ceremony. Paul said an Our Father, and she made a tremulous cross, and together they said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and covered the ugly things with dirt.

  “You’re home,” her mother said to Paul, coming downstairs, her hair done, dressed and effortlessly stylish. “Help me put these sweaters in the cedar closet. I’m afraid the moths will get them.” She patted Nicole on the head, stroking her hair in a tender, possessive way, as if to make up for deserting her, touching her too much, and together they went into the cellar.

  Only now, telling Jocelyn, did Nicole wonder what Paul had seen that she had no knowledge of. Perhaps that was why he was so protective of her. How lonely it must have been, without someone to tell you that things would be all right.

  On other days, when her mother did not come downstairs, she remembered the secret she and Paul shared, those unshriven dolls quietly crumbling to dust. They were like buried saints in the garden. They would protect her while she waited for her mother to be her mother again.

  In the summer when she biked up and down the hills of her neighborhood, she sometimes went too far and reached the supermarket, where strangers stood around the parking lot for no apparent reason, smoking and drinking out of paper bags. They were old men—old to her, anyway. And if she passed them in the day it was all right, but if it got dark and she wheeled her bike past to get a drink from the fountain, her legs in their shorts stood out like white birches in the twilight and she felt them lean in.

  She was going to be a nun, she decided. Then she would be safe in the living light. Like a drifting ghost or a graceful, flightless bird, free of the hungry gazes of strangers, free of worry about her mother.

  She kept imagining herself as Hildegard, and having secret visions. She biked through her neighborhood with her sweatshirt hood up, imagining it was her veil, and looked for the light that was supposed to come shattering down out of the sky. She looked for the living light in the green summer branches of the trees, in the ripples of air on the black roads, in the gleam of the cars that whipped by her when she cycled alone on Commonwealth Ave. She rode alone; she pumped up hills and glided down them, loving the rush of air in her face. She searched everywhere she knew to look, but the living light refused to show itself to her.

  She knew that when it came, it would sunder everything before it, that it would pierce her straight through with its beauty. She was even ready for it to hurt. For something that powerful and pure to touch you, well—she was sure it would hurt. She practiced for it, digging her fingernails into her palms so that she left angry red tracks in her skin.

  Hildegard said that God had miraculous healing powers.

  Nicole prayed, Dear Lord, cure my bronchitis. Sincerely, Nicole.

  Hildegard said, We must also endure pain to experience divinity.

  In church, the priest reminded the congregation that the best evidence we had that we were fallen was the pains women bear, as a result of childbirth, and the other, unnameable pains. Evidence, he repeated, is there. In biology.

  Nicole prayed, Dear Lord, it’s all right if it hurts. Even if it hurts a lot. I still want to see the living light. Sincerely, Nicole.

  The summer she was ten, an old friend of her mother’s arrived with a storm of boxes and suitcases and a giant black Angora rabbit that lived in a hutch on the porch, forever harassed by the cats. She was a tall, angular woman with clean lines, all bone from shoulder to collar and down her flat chest. But bony in the way flattered by low V-neck sweaters. She often stood smoking on the back porch, standing like a model with her back bowed, her hip jutting, one slim elbow resting on the crook of her pelvis. Nicole’s mother told her she was going through a divorce. “It’s a very difficult time for Mrs. Owens. Don’t ask her about the divorce, and just let her alone.” Nicole’s mother had a tendency to treat a divorce as a cause for mourning. She spoke in hushed tones all that summer and moved warily through the house, preparing plates of food for Mrs. Owens to eat separately in the guest room when she “didn’t feel up to socializing.”

  You couldn’t just ignore her, though. Her laundry was in with your underwear that had the days of the week on them: black lacy things, not like your mother’s sensible flesh-toned bras. Her boxes of things lined the upstairs hall, and you couldn’t help pawing through them sometimes, when the door to the guest room was shut. Nicole found curving modern glass lamps wrapped in paper, dishes with naked impressionistic women on them, a yearbook with Mrs. Ow
ens and Nicole’s mother in long white dresses and floppy hair, laughing, nearly twins. With the yearbook were books like she’d never seen before: A Short History of Sex. Oriental Erotica. The Female Orgasm. She flipped through the books quickly, reading out of the corner of her eye. Only a glancing sin. Here, Japanese ink-wash paintings: women with high eyebrows and blackened teeth, in a tangle of patterned fabric. Men clambering on top of them like bronco riders. In other books, medical diagrams, a naked woman from the side. Her hands on the inside of her thighs, busy. A naked man standing nearby, his genitals two sketched parentheses, attending helpfully.

  After dinner, Mrs. Owens came down and played backgammon with Nicole’s mother until late. At the stairs, Nicole listened to them laughing, high and sharp, like teenagers. She wasn’t invited; Mrs. Owens and her mother talked long past bedtime, long past when her father shut the bedroom door with a sigh. In the morning there would be an empty bottle of wine left on the table, a plate with crumbs of cheese and crackers, an envelope with the backgammon score, the tally of the money lost, in her mother’s neat hand.

  And sometimes she’d be bouncing a tennis ball in the driveway and the ball would find its way around to the back of the house, where Mrs. Owens stood in her model pose, the cigarette hanging from a hand. “Come here,” Mrs. Owens said the first time she wandered near. “Pull up a chair.” She was one of those adults who treated you like an adult; she acted like you were in on some secret together. “Don’t tell your mother I’m smoking,” she’d say. “I promised her one a day, but I’m on my fourth. So goes the revolution, ness pah?”

  Nicole didn’t have a sense of smell, anyway; the cigarette smoke blew right past her. Mrs. Owens liked to talk about the beautiful house she’d run away from, all the nice things, the clothes she’d left behind—my God, the clothes. All the big designer names. Dior, she loved Dior. One dress, she could kill herself for leaving behind—black and white. Slit up to here. Neckline down to there. Her husband loved her in that dress. Don’t get her started about the shoes. All she’d thought to bring were her loafers.

  “Why did you leave all that stuff behind?”

  Mrs. Owens smoked like a movie star. She took a long pull, looked at the cigarette, exhaled softly, inhaled again. “I just had to leave. I couldn’t not. I’ll get them later, if he hasn’t already given them to her.”

  Nicole understood not to ask about who he and her were. It was better to sit on the edge of the deck in her shorts, picking at bug bites and letting Mrs. Owens’s conversation drift over them. “Don’t ever get involved with a man, Nicki, who’s going to tear your heart out ten years later,” Mrs. Owens told her. “Just don’t do it. Have your fun. Live it up.” Then a harsh, barking laugh, too big to come out of such a slender shape. Big with sadness.

  “But you will, won’t you,” she’d say later, when it was getting dark and they were at risk of being discovered by Nicole’s parents coming home. “Nothing I say’s going to stop you.” And she’d look around to make sure they were alone. “Nothing your parents can say, either. You’ll see.” She’d tap her nose slyly. “You’ll see.”

  Then she’d have to stub her cigarette out, fast like a guilty teenager, because Nicole’s mother was home, calling for them.

  Later, she left, taking her enormous rabbit, her dishes, her boxes of books with her—except for one. Nicole had tucked it—A Short History of Sex—into the back of her closet.

  A week later, when they were seasoning the big cast iron pans, the ones she could lift only with two hands, she asked her mother where Mrs. Owens had gone. Had she found that apartment she’d wanted? Did she ever get those clothes? Her mother told her that Mrs. Owens had worked things out with her husband, that she’d gone back. The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

  “I thought she wasn’t happy,” Nicole remembered saying.

  Her mother threw a pan into the sink with a clatter that made their ears ring. “You have to understand. I want you to understand. Marriages take work. They aren’t always fun. You don’t always feel happy. Sometimes you have to say to yourself, ‘I’m needed here. I have to stick this out.’” She began scrubbing the pan, her thin, freckled arms rasping at a calcified layer of grease. “When it stops being fun, still, you stay.”

  This was ’96 or ’97—it was a bit hazy now—the year of the April Fool’s blizzard. Schools closed, trains stopped, and people skied down Comm Ave. In the suburbs, the trees’ branches buckled and froze in the ice, trapped until spring. The only kid in Nicole’s class who lived near her was a Japanese girl named Kumiko who had asked to be called Katie the first day she appeared in school. They fell into an easy, excitable friendship during the snow week, meeting on the corner to wander the neighborhood, throwing snowballs at cars, darting across backyards, making snow forts framed by the frozen arms of the trees.

  One evening they trooped through the snow to Katie’s house for dinner. They shed their wet jackets and boots and Katie’s mother made them murky green tea and gave them tiny cookies with the faces of cats. It was a tall, grand house with high staircases and dark unopened rooms. They were playing with Katie’s model horses on the stairs when Nicole noticed a strange little setup in the hall: a cabinet with a dark statue of a serene seated figure ringed with flower petals and flanked by sticks like long cigarettes.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “A shrine. For Buddha.” Katie sounded bored. She nudged Nicole’s horse with her own and made it whinny and paw.

  “What’s Buddha?” It sounded like a holiday, maybe one of the many Jewish holidays her friends had off from school and they had learned about in assembly. During one, you blew into a curled horn. During another, you couldn’t eat bread.

  Katie sat up and preened a little. “Not what. Who. He’s like a god, only not really. And he’s a real person, like Jesus.”

  “What does he want you to do?” That was what Jesus was for, wasn’t he—he wanted the best for you, and he was disappointed if you didn’t live up to his exacting standard.

  Katie shrugged. “He just wants you to be happy. He wants all suffering to cease.” Then she tossed her head impatiently, like a horse. “You can’t understand Buddha. You’re not Asian.”

  “Kumiko!” Katie’s mother was in the doorway, and spoke sharply in Japanese. Katie shrank back. “I mean, you have to be a Buddhist to know.”

  They moved to Katie’s room to play. Katie was obsessed with babies, probably because she had a two-year-old brother. “Now you be the mom,” she told Nicole. “You pant and scream a lot. I’ll be the dad and I’ll coach you.”

  They gave birth to stuffed animals again and again, pressing their legs together and forcing them between their thighs.

  Katie had posters on her walls with Japanese writing; Nicole wanted to try writing her own words. Katie was reluctant but eventually showed her the characters for “star,” “moon,” and “I love you.” “How do you write ‘Buddha’?” Nicole demanded.

  “Like this.” Katie wrote the word ‘Buddha’ in English.

  “No! How do you write it in characters?”

  “Hmm.” Katie’s hand hovered over the page. She drew two characters: a tree with one branch leaning and a little house with a single window.

  It was like a code.

  After dinner, Nicole watched Katie’s parents light the long sticks of incense and make quick bows to the Buddha. The candles trailed thin ribbons of smoke. Nicole’s eyes and nose ran. The air was filled with a strange odor; it was like tasting a new spice, sweet and rotting, clovey and sharp. It was the first smell she had been able to experience in years: a tiny miracle. When Katie’s parents turned away, she gave a small, secret bow to the statue.

  After her playdate with Katie, she put the scarf and the veil away, as her mother had told her she would, saying that wanting to be a nun was just a phase, and she stopped searching for the living light. But her mother was wrong about other things.

  Once Paul was planning to go on an outdoor-adventure
camping trip run by another church, and their old family priest, the one who had married her parents, came to their house. He drank a cup of tea and ruffled Nicole’s hair and talked about what a good, old Catholic family they were, and her mother beamed and bustled about, preparing a plate of cookies. He told her mother not to let Paul go on the camping trip.

  “Why?”

  He wouldn’t say exactly. His eyes darted everywhere and especially to Nicole’s; she was sitting with her legs up on the couch, only half-listening. He told her that the pastor taking kids on the trip was unconventional and had a reputation and he didn’t want Paul mixed up in all of that. He was a good boy.

  It had taken her this many years, she told Jocelyn, to realize what might have happened on that trip, and what had probably happened to other boys. Their priest had saved Paul.

  But what about the other boys, the ones who were not good?

  Paul’s life then was filled with chem tests and choir practice and soccer after school. Midnight lock-ins when the older kids would sleep over in the church after vespers, tell ghost stories, play poker with the cool young priests, the ones who secretly smoked and wore black cowboy boots under their cassocks, who roared up to services on motorcycles. The cool priests would give him advice about girls, and he trusted them, didn’t he? And sometimes boys were chosen to help the young father get the candles and the incense ready before services. Usually poor kids, kids with single mothers, kids with no one at home. He’d feel glad for them, that they were finally getting special treatment, for once in their lives. Off they’d go, the lucky ones, into the private rooms. And some people knew and some did not, but either way he never said anything, because what was there to say?