The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Valerie Brelinski

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-698-17100-8

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One: The House on Ninth Avenue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: The New World

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: Hilda’s House

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Four: The House on Ninth Avenue (Again)

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Five: Sunny San Diego

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  To my mother and father

  To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  On the last day of August in 1970, and a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, Jory’s father drove his two daughters out to an abandoned house and left them there.

  The trip had not taken long. Her father piloted the car with resolute determination toward the very edge of town. He drove past the railroad tracks and the fish hatchery and the rodeo grounds, past the sugar beet factory and the slaughterhouse and the meatpacking plant; all the while Jory stared out the window in a silent fury. Next to her in the Buick’s backseat, Grace was practically unconscious. She lay slumped over with her head resting accidentally on Jory’s shoulder, her drool dampening the upper portion of Jory’s T-shirt. Jory gave her sister a shove and then turned toward the window. Black Cat Lane and Chicken Dinner Road and Floating Feather rolled past—long, twisty lanes sided with fields of sugar beets and alfalfa and corn. Jory watched a lone mallard drop and skid like a bomber onto an irrigation ditch while three goats perched king of the hill–style on a salvaged roof a farmer had put out for them. Her father continued on past several vast silagey-smelling feedlots, and then the fields grew even larger and the scenery more sparse and the houses less frequent, and finally he turned down a narrow unpaved lane that Jory had never seen before. Then he stopped the car and opened the door. Jory refused to look up at the strange house where she and her sister were now to live. She sat in the backseat with her hands between her knees until her father pulled her forcibly out of the car and set her on her feet in the dirt.

  The house of their exile was ancient and dilapidated, its white siding weather warped, its roof’s shingles curling and covered with moss. And below the sharp peak of the house’s second story, an enormous diamond-shaped window stared out from its gable like the jack of diamond’s lonely eye. But it wasn’t the condition of the house that mattered, Jory knew, as much as its location. The house was safely hidden away on a back acre of Idaho farmland, far from any schools or churches or stores or neighborhoods. And it was this isolation for which Jory’s father had paid. Privacy was of the utmost importance now, he had said. Or perhaps more correctly, the word he was looking for was secrecy.

  Her father unwedged the few taped-together boxes from the Buick’s trunk. One at a time, he carried them up the house’s peeling green steps and deposited them onto the living room floor. Jory stood holding the screen door open and taking occasional, unwilling peeks at the dim interior of the house. A brown couch sagged dead-cat-like against one wall. The portion of the floor she could see from the doorway was made of sloping hardwood, and was partly covered by a gray flowered rug that must have been bride-beautiful at some point a very long time ago. Jory heard the car door slam. After a second, her sister came wandering up the porch steps. Grace leaned against the door frame for a moment and then wobbled toward the couch, where she proceeded to lie down on her side, her face buried against one of the sofa’s armrests.

  “I think that about does it.” Her father wiped his hands down the front of his khaki pants. “Yup,” he said, gazing about the room. “There you are.”

  Jory gave him a hard, bright look. “Here we are.”

  He searched for something in his pockets. He whistled “Red River Valley” and patted down his shirtfront, and then his pants pockets. “Ah!” He held up a small silver key. “You’ll be needing this.” He smiled and handed it to her.

  Without looking at the key, Jory tossed it onto the top of one of the unopened boxes.

  “Hey, now,” her father said in his calmest voice. “You don’t want to lose that.” After walking over to the cardboard box and retrieving the key, he handed it to her once more, this time pressing it into her palm and closing her fingers firmly around it.

  “Don’t you have another one?” She inspected his face.

  “Well, Mom and I will keep an extra, of course.” He shrugged. “Just in case.”

  “Just in case?”

  “Yes, and don’t forget, there’s milk and things that need to go in the fridge. Also, the front door may stick a little when you first try to open it, so you’ll have to shove hard and jiggle the handle up and down.” He demonstrated and then paused, waiting for a look of recognition that Jory refused to give. “Okay, well, I’ll be back to check on you in a day or two. I think Grace’s correspondence course books should be here by then, so I’ll bring them along.” He studied the ceiling the way he always did when he needed hope or inspiration. “You might want to get Grace into bed. The doctor gave her a little something to calm her down. A shot or a pill or something.”

  “I noticed.”

  “You know,” he said, ignoring her tone and marching on, “you’ve got just about everything here.” He cast a proprietary glance around the room. “I think you girls are all set. Really. I think that about does it.”

  She stood and stared at him. His smile seemed sewn in place.

  “Dad.”

  He stepped toward her and then pulled her head tight against his chest. For a moment she listened to his huge heart’s muffled thumping. Then she could feel him sigh. He stepped back and put his hands on either side of her face. Bending down, he pressed his lips against a spot in the middle of her forehead. “JoryAnne,” he whispered, and then touched the spot firmly with the tip of his finger, as if sealing the kiss into place.

  She had a sudden impulse to slap him.

&nb
sp; Jory sat on one of the boxes with her back to the door, and as her father pulled the Buick out onto the roadway she could smell the dust that drifted up in the wake of his leaving. For a moment she remained like this, and then with a start she jumped up and scrambled toward the house’s stairway, leaping up the steps to the second-floor landing and its diamond-shaped window. Breathless, she hung on to the window’s angled frame and peered out. The glass was slightly wavy and thick, but she could see everything below: the sway of a giant willow, the branches of a plum tree set to shaking by old men crows already drunk on its rotting fruit, the steady trajectory of her father’s green Buick disappearing down the graveled country road. She watched, unmoving, until the last of the car’s comet tail of dust evaporated into the late afternoon air. Then she sank down onto her knees on the hardwood floor. This high perch made her feel removed and above, as far away as banished maidens locked in smoothed-stone towers. Forever gazing down, they waited for nothing, for knights who were already dead and wouldn’t be coming.

  That first night she refused to sleep in either of the two iron-framed beds. She didn’t unpack any of the boxes either. As it grew dark, she covered Grace with a red plaid blanket and then moved out onto the back porch and sat on its wooden floor with a wedding quilt she’d found on one of the beds wrapped around her. I John 4:7—Beloved, let us love one another, the quilt admonished in embroidered script, courtesy of Laveeta Lamar Hicks. John 15:13—Greater love hath no man, proclaimed Eleanor Genevieve Doerksen. Let love be your greatest aim . . . For God so loved the world . . . Love never fails.

  “Fuck you. And you. And you.” Jory twisted the quilt around to its other side. Here there were no Bible sayings, only endless twining circles—wedding rings stitched carefully in pink and gold thread. She ran her hand over the puckered material. How many days and nights did it take to sew something like this? And did each woman do her own portion separately, or did they gather over a long sewing table in someone’s living room and talk as they worked? And why did they do it anyway? Look where it had ended up. They were all dead, the quiltmakers and the bride, and their painstakingly stitched words meant nothing . . . nothing.

  She pulled the quilt tighter around her shoulders. Something about the way she was sitting, hunched and small, reminded her of how once when she was little, to spite her mother, she had hidden beneath a table in the back corner of the public library. She had watched from behind the table’s great carved wooden leg as her mother stood in line, checked out her books, and then calmly set off for the drugstore with Jory’s two sisters in tow. Jory had come out from her hiding place then, smacking her head hard on the table edge in her hurry, just in time to see the three of them walking past the glass doors of the library and on down the sidewalk, her little sister occasionally stooping to scratch at something on her knee.

  Jory was quite sure that she had forgotten that incident completely. She glared up at the sky and the points of the stars blurred together. She cried then, a few big, splintered sobs, and pounded at the porch’s floorboards with her bare heels over and over until finally, wondrously, it hurt enough to stop. She rocked back and forth hugging her knees, holding her bruised feet carefully off the floor while her chest seized, her lungs catching at frayed threads of air. She wiped her nose on a corner of the quilt, and then held still listening. The night air hummed with the same happy insects. A farm or two away a dog barked, and then barked again. She was still here. Nothing had changed. What had she expected? She tipped slowly over onto her side, clutching the quilt, and let her face slide against the cool of the painted wood porch. God is love, she thought. For God so loved the world.

  The sunlight slanted through the screen of the porch, warming her face and bringing the gradual knowledge that she was somewhere strange and that her neck was now very sore. She sat up slowly. Several parts of her body ached from a night on the wood floor. Her feet in particular, and the backs of her heels. She stepped over the heap of quilt and marched into the house, letting the screen door whap shut behind her. Inside the doorway, though, she stopped and stood.

  In the morning light, the kitchen looked as if someone had cut its angles out with left-handed scissors, and it smelled like cat food and old bleach, or damp, many-eyed potatoes. Jory walked slowly from the wide double sink to the prehistoric gas stove, and then to the linoleum-topped kitchen table. She was supposed to live here in this place, in this peculiar old house that smelled like someone else’s cast-off life. She could feel herself breathing in an irregular way, as if she had to concentrate in order to make her lungs expand and relax.

  She walked into the living room. Grace was lying on the dead cat couch still wearing her tennis shoes and snoring softly beneath the plaid blanket. The unopened boxes squatted in a circle around them. One of the boxes had a large paper sack on top that was leaking something pink and white. A large blossom-colored pool had formed around the bag and was now dripping down the side of the box. Cherry vanilla. He’d always bought it for her when she was sick or sad. Once, when Jory had to have stitches, he brought the whole carton into her bedroom wrapped in a dishtowel and fed her one spoonful after another while he explained how scar tissue formed. How even the stars healed themselves. He had been wearing a tie with small green ducks on it.

  Jory found one of her tennis shoes under the couch and the other near the front door. She crammed them onto her feet without untying the laces. After one glance back at her sister, she fled out the door and down the painted steps, the backs of her bruised heels burning like fire.

  The road that led away from the house was lined with cottonwood trees, and little bits of the fluff blew all around her and clung to her hair as she strode fast and faster past weedy patches and fields of corn and late summer wheat. She passed a barn that had faded to an unidentifiable color. A large spotted dog lay panting in a strip of shade beneath the barn’s overhang. The dog inspected her; it raised its wedge-shaped head and blinked slowly, but did not get up. Jory kept walking. Once, she turned around to look behind her, and still, even at this distance, she could see the house’s diamond-shaped window winking at her in the late morning sun.

  She hadn’t noticed the heat. The blood now hummed in her head as she marched along, kicking up spits of loose gravel. The flat string of road ran on ahead for as far as she could see, shimmering and wavering a little at its farthest point. Jory made a half-strangled noise deep in her throat and sat down hard next to the edge of the road. A drain ditch bristling with cattails rushed foamily past her feet.

  The wind began to blow in short, dry little gusts that she could feel in the sweaty sections of her hair. A large crow sailed past and then landed clumsily on the thick stalk of a cattail. The bird maneuvered briefly, attempting to vary its grip in hopes of a stronger foothold, but quickly gave up and flapped on. Jory stood and peered toward the road. A rounded truck the color of curdled milk was coming toward her. She stared as it passed her, and then suddenly with a bump and a sigh it pulled off onto the road’s steep shoulder and came to a stop. She could hear a crow squawking insistently somewhere overhead. The truck reversed gears and backed up slowly to the spot where she was standing. AL’S FROZEN ICE CREAM TREATS, the truck’s passenger side read. TASTY AND DELICIOUS! The man inside was already leaning across the seat to open the door. “Miss your bus?” he said, smiling. The truck’s front seat was high above her and she had to grab at the crease-hardened hand he offered down. With a powerful pull he hoisted her firmly up onto the cab’s slick vinyl seat.

  “Well, hello there,” he said. He raked his blue-tattooed fingers through his ponytailed hair and made no move toward going anywhere.

  Jory stared out through the windshield at the road she had just come down, and then behind her at the tiny diamond-windowed house nearly hidden in the trees. She could feel the back of her throat suddenly swelling hot and tight with tears. “Where have you been?” she whispered. “Where were you?”

  “Well,” he said, “in betwe
en selling delicious ice cream treats, I’ve been busy scouring the landscape for you.” He rested his elbow on the seatback and with one finger pushed a stray strand of her hair behind her ear. For a second, neither of them moved. Then he reached out and pulled all of her past the gearshift and onto his lap. She sat sideways across his hard legs and leaned her head against his shirt, breathing in his smell. It was the same as always—engine grease and cigarette smoke and something unidentifiable that she always thought of as burned sugar. She closed her eyes. Through his chest she could hear him humming a song she didn’t know. He held her carefully with one arm and she could feel his muscles tense as he put the truck into gear and then steered them back out onto the road. He flicked the switch on the loudspeaker and as the truck jounced along music played above her like a carnival tune from a faraway fair, a tinkling gypsy music as strange as a blue tattoo. It followed them like a long holiday all the way down the road to wherever it was they were going.

  Part One

  The House on Ninth Avenue

  Chapter One

  It was like this.

  There was to be no mixed bathing, no circuses or bowling alleys or pool halls, no card playing (except Uno), no dancing or movie watching, no makeup or pierced ears or flashy jewelry or immodest dress of any kind. Men were to have short hair and women long and Joy was spelled Jesus and Others and then You. Some things were so taboo that no mention was even necessary: alcohol, premarital relations, and swearing. Gosh and gee and Jiminy Christmas were out, as were fart and butt. Sundays were for Sunday School and Junior Church and Bible Quizzing, not for working or going to the grocery store. It all sounded funny when she said it out loud, but really it wasn’t.

  Jory had tried explaining this to several incredulous listeners when they were all in sixth grade at Eisenhower Elementary, and now she was glad to be going to Arco Christian Academy, where everyone already knew and understood and there was no need to discuss any of it over sloppy joes and fruit betty surprise. It had made her feel tired and squinty eyed to have to repeat why her mother wore her father’s Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain around her neck instead of wearing a diamond wedding ring, and why they had a bomb shelter in their garage instead of a car, and a ham radio antenna where the TV antenna should be, why they ate lentil loaf nearly every night and kept a refrigerator in the backyard full of nothing but apples, and why she and her sisters had all skipped first grade. There were way too many things to explain and no words for half of it. And for quite a while, when she was younger, she hadn’t known she would have to.