Jory sat very still and stared straight ahead, even though she could feel Rhonda Russell looking at her sideways out of the corners of her slanted eyes. Someone had turned the lights back on and Jory’s father was talking quietly to Grace and holding her by the arm. Grace smiled shakily at him and then pulled out of his grasp and headed toward the platform at the front of the church. Brother Elmore was standing and trying to smile as Grace climbed the stairs and approached the podium, but Grace brushed right past him and gripped the wooden pulpit with both hands. She stood straight and tall as she always did and Jory could tell that her mother was beginning to cry in the pew in front of her. Grace continued to stand there saying nothing, just looking out over the audience. All the people in the congregation seemed to be holding their breath.
At last Grace leaned a little toward the microphone. “When I was exactly seven years old,” she said, “I listened to Hazel and Harmon Schmelzenbach speak in a Sunday night service just like this one. They showed us slides from Swaziland, Africa, of muddy rivers and huge snakes and red-painted natives holding spears in front of grass huts, and I knew right then that I was being called by God to be a foreign missionary. I knew, even though I was only seven years old, that God had sought me out, and that I had been chosen for this very purpose, and that everything in my life should be lived toward that end. I had to wait almost ten more years before I could go on a mission of my own. But I spent that time studying and praying and fasting and planning for the day that I, too, would be able to say, ‘Here am I, Lord, send me,’ and then come back to my home church bearing witness of the work that I had done in countries that had never heard the good news of the Gospel.”
Grace stopped for a moment, pushing her hair back with her hands, her birthmark partly visible. Even from where she was sitting, Jory could see the faint line of sweat that dotted her sister’s hairline. “And tonight,” Grace said, her voice shaking, “tonight is that night.” She regripped the pulpit and seemed to sway a little on her feet. Jory noticed that her father had slowly been approaching the platform the whole time Grace was speaking, and he was now climbing the carpeted steps up to his daughter. “But the work the Lord has done in me has just begun,” said Grace with a radiant smile. “His plans for me are greater than I had even anticipated.” Her father had now reached Grace and was stretching his hand out toward her arm. Without turning her head, Grace swatted her father’s hand away. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” Grace said, “may it be done unto me according to thy word.” Grace took two steps around her father and walked down the platform stairs and all the way up the red-carpeted church aisle and out the back door. Everyone in the pews listened as the church’s heavy oak door thudded shut behind her.
“Where’d Grace go?” Frances stood up on the seat of the pew and turned toward the back of the church. “Where are your teeth, Rhonda?” she said loudly, peering down at both of them.
Brother Elmore was giving a signal to the organist and then waving his hands at the congregation. “Let’s all stand. Page one fourteen in your hymnals, folks—‘We’ll Girdle the Globe with Salvation’—page one hundred and fourteen. The first, second, and final verse.”
Chapter Four
In August, the air would bake all day, getting hotter and hotter each afternoon until finally sometime around eight or nine at night the sky would turn a purple-blue and licks of heat lightning would dart and flicker silently at the edge of the horizon, like silver snake tongues trying to catch a smell of the evening. Jory loved the air then; it felt thick and smelled like new dirt, the kind that violets and mossy things grow in, so she didn’t even mind so much the stars being gone. At this time of day, she liked to walk barefoot on the sidewalk that was still warm from the sun. Even if you came out at midnight, it wouldn’t have cooled off. From where she was tightrope walking along the curb, she could see Mrs. Hewett sitting on her front step smoking. The end of the cigarette glowed large and then went out. Even though she’d never seen one, Jory imagined that this is what a firefly must look like—like a lonely cigarette smoked by a ghost. She said these last words over in her head and then softly out loud.
“Jory,” Mrs. Hewett said.
Jory made her way through the grass to the Hewetts’ front porch and stood a few feet away from Mrs. Hewett’s long tanned legs. She watched the red tip of Mrs. H’s cigarette glowing in the darkness. Smoking was an abomination in the sight of the Lord. It destroyed healthy lung tissue and healthy lives. And it looked so cool.
“I still haven’t paid you for last week.” Mrs. Hewett flicked expertly at her cigarette and a BB of ash flew onto the cement. “Let me go get my checkbook.”
“No, it’s okay. I can just get it on Monday.”
“If you’re sure.” Mrs. Hewett took a long puff. “Say, did your father have any luck finding someone to go to Mexico? Jack would have done it, but I said no, I didn’t want him gone that long. I feel too lonely here with just Dinah and me. This is not the most exciting town in the world.” She dropped the cigarette into her can of Tab and it went out with a hiss. “But I’m sure he’ll find somebody. Maybe he should even try the cops down there, although I hear they’re not much better than the crooks.” She laughed briefly. “Maybe they are the crooks.”
Jory tried to smile. “I better go, I guess.”
“Oh, sure. Um, Jory—” Mrs. Hewett took out her pack of Kools and began tapping it against her thigh. “I’m really sorry about whatever happened to Grace. Whoever the guy is.” Mrs. Hewett slid another cigarette out and held it between her fingers. She gazed off at the night sky. “You know, if it doesn’t cool off soon, I may just have to kill myself.”
Jory walked back down the sidewalk to her house. The porch light was on and small white moths fluttered and circled endlessly above the evergreen bushes. The sky was completely dark now and the purply clouds had moved away. A sliver of a fingernail moon hung over their backyard, but the rest of the sky was as blank as cloth.
Inside, her mother was washing dishes and her father was sitting at the kitchen table peeling apples with his old Swiss Army knife. Jory slid into one of the chairs next to him. He held out a slice of apple to her on the blade of his knife, but she shook her head.
“They’re still good,” he said. “Not like the ones you get at the store. Those are mere imitations of apples. Not even reasonable facsimiles.” He smiled.
“I was talking to Mrs. Hewett.”
“Um-hm.” Her father picked up another apple and made a neat nick at its top.
“She thinks someone did something to Grace in Mexico. A man, I mean.” Jory could feel her face and neck getting hot. This was not the way she talked to her father. This was not what they talked about.
Her father had a perfect curl of red apple skin hanging off the end of his knife. He set the apple down on the table, curl and all. He glanced up at Jory’s mother. “So much for confidentiality,” he said. He took a long breath and then let it out again. “Jory, there are some things in life that are, well, private. Personal things that don’t necessarily benefit from a public discussion.”
Jory said nothing.
“Not every topic demands a public airing.”
“I’m not public. I mean, the public.”
“No,” her father said after a moment, “maybe not. But do you really feel it’s imperative that we talk about this right now? At this very second?”
Jory waited. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that her mother had turned off the faucet and was standing next to the sink with her hands in the dishwater.
Her father folded his hands together in front of him. “I’m working very hard here, Jory, to keep things on an even keel.”
Jory picked up her father’s knife and gouged a small hole in the green linoleum tabletop. “Even the neighbors know more than I do.”
“That’s enough, Jory.” Her mother dropped a large handful of silverware onto the counter.
No one said anything more, and after a while her father recaptured his knife and went back to peeling apples and her mother began rinsing the dishes. Jory stood up then and walked down the hall to her room. Grace’s bedroom door was shut and Frances was already asleep in the bed across from hers. Jory lay down on her bed on her back and closed her eyes. If she were at Rhonda’s right now, they’d be watching The Avengers on TV or drawing breasts and mustaches on her troll dolls. Or maybe they’d get out her (hidden and illicit) Ouija board to find out which boys from school they would marry. Jory sat up. She could hear that jingly carnival music playing somewhere off in the distance. She couldn’t tell, though, if it was coming nearer or drifting farther away. The window at the foot of her bed was already open because of the heat, but the screen was not. She pulled and jiggled the little buttons at the base of the mesh screen, but nothing happened. She thought she could hear the music becoming the slightest bit more faint. With both hands she pushed hard right in the middle of the screen until it made a small popping sound and fell out of its moorings and onto the grass below. Jory pushed the wooden window frame up as far as it would go and stuck one leg through until it touched the ground below. She pulled her other leg after it.
Outside she could hear the music more clearly. She walked down the street until she could see the white dot of a truck several blocks ahead of her, and then she began to run. She ran quietly down Ninth Avenue, her feet barely tapping the ground. There were no cars and she ran smooth and steady down the middle of the road, the warm air flattening her T-shirt against her chest. It was like swimming through perfect water, the outside temperature the same as her insides. Like she had no skin. As she loped past, she could see people inside their houses watching television or sitting in the lamplight at kitchen tables. It was as if she were a ghost drifting by—she could see them but they couldn’t seem to see her. She had read a book in school like that: a man who died revisits his home and floats quietly past the places and people he has known without them ever sensing his presence. It was a sad book, Jory remembered. Sad, but wonderful.
The ice cream truck was much closer. In fact it was now stopped under a streetlight next to the grassy lot the kids called God’s Park because of a drunk old man who used to hand out Bible tracts there for money. She slowed to a walk and tried to breathe normally. He was lying near the truck in a patch of tall grass with his arms crossed behind his head. She walked over and stood next to his lower legs. “Hi,” she said, panting only slightly.
He leaned up onto his elbows. “Well, hey there.” He peered behind her. “Where’s your little chaperone?” His hair was in several braids that stood out at various angles from his head.
“In bed.”
He cocked his head at her. “It’s pretty dark out here for a lovely young lady such as yourself.”
“Well,” she said, sitting down in the grass, “I guess I’ll just have to chance it.” She plucked out a long weed and began peeling back its layers of green skin. She smiled slightly, amazed at her own daring.
“How about a Swirl Top? A Push Up? An Old Milwaukee?” He stood up and went over to the truck, disappearing inside. After a moment, his head reappeared. “Here,” he said, and tossed a shiny can in her direction. She tried to catch it, but it fell at her feet and rolled a few inches away. “Better not open it for a minute,” he said, coming around the side of the truck. “Pretty explosive stuff.”
He sat down next to her and took a long swig, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down the length of his throat. He picked up the other beer and opened it and passed her the can.
She held the beer in her hand. It was ice cold, and a bitter metal smell wafted up from the triangular opening. Her mother would cry if she could see her doing this. “I’m not really thirsty,” she said, and put the can on the ground between them.
He shrugged. “More for me,” he said, and lay back down in the flattened grass.
Jory leaned cautiously back into the grass next to him. The sky was huge and dark. She could hear crickets in the weeds nearby, and maybe even a frog or two. “My big sister went to Mexico and now there’s something wrong with her,” she said.
“What do you mean? Is she sick?”
“I don’t know. No. Not exactly. But she says things smell different, and she stays in her room and cries all the time under a blanket, and my dad tried to hire a detective to go to Mexico and look for some man, but he won’t talk about it.” Jory sighed. “And my mom is furious at everyone.”
“Wow,” he said. “How old is your sister?”
“She’s seventeen. She turns eighteen in December.”
They lay there and the crickets scratched and chirped as soft and as near as Jory had ever heard them.
He pointed up. “Have you ever noticed how when the clouds move in the sky at night, it looks like the stars are moving and the clouds are holding still. You know what I mean?”
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
“And sometimes when the clouds move especially fast, when they’re really zooming along, it’s like the whole world, the whole curved earth you’re lying on, is holding still while the sky above is flying, and all you can do is just hang on.”
He had reached out his hand and was holding hers. Not too tight, just loosely as if it were almost accidental, as if it were a thing that they had fallen into, like rain falling easy and gentle out of the sky. The sky. It was dark as a purple-black plum but pierced here and there by tiny fingerlings of light. A few brave stars that had poked right through the rough cloth that held the world together. An entire, perfectly spaced constellation. A whole family of stars, with not one star missing.
Chapter Five
The air in the house on Ninth Avenue took on a strange, musty smell. A cramped, closeted smell that reminded Jory of the nursing home her grandfather had lived in for a month before he died. Each day when Jory came home from babysitting she would open their front door and the odor would strike her anew—it was a smell of things stored in boxes, dusty and sour, of roots and things growing underground—the smell of a place where people are deliberately staying in one spot. Where people are moving as little as possible.
Their father was gone. No one had said why, but he was now in Mexico. He had kissed Jory good-bye early one morning when she was still in bed. “Be very good, and take care of Frances,” he’d said, smoothing back her sleep-wrinkled hair. “And don’t cause your mother any problems. All right?” She had nodded. Her father had stood up and the mattress felt suddenly light and insubstantial as a cloud, as untethered and free floating as a leaf dropped into a stream. “Wait,” she’d said, sitting up in bed, but he had already picked up his suitcase and was closing the front door.
Their mother had taken to living in her bedroom with the shades drawn, and Grace was spending nearly all day in hers. Some new and unspoken contract had been devised by which Grace and their mother agreed never to deliberately intersect: a wordless schedule that allowed for only one of them to be outside of their bedroom at a time. This was mostly not a problem since their mother left hers only to use the bathroom or to take more of her headache pills with a glass of milk.
Yesterday, though, Jory had been standing in the hallway when her mother came back from the kitchen at the exact same time that Grace opened her bedroom door. “Oh,” Grace had murmured. “Sorry.” She lowered her eyes. Her mother said nothing. For a moment the three of them stood in the hall looking at the floor. “Maybe you should be,” their mother said, her voice so low Jory couldn’t quite be sure she had heard it. Their mother turned then and went into her room and shut the door. Jory continued standing in the hallway. Grace made a coughing sound and padded down the hall into the bathroom.
Grace wore the same outfit day after day: a knee-length green skirt that had been the bottom portion of her Pathfinders uniform and an old white button-down shirt of their father’s. She rolled up the sleeves,
but the rest of it, the front of it, was huge and hung down almost to her knees. It didn’t matter what she was doing, that’s what she wore, although these days she didn’t seem to be doing much.
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