The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  I know you not.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Good Shepherd Funeral Home was a white-stuccoed building partially covered with ivy. Outside in the parking lot it was cold and windy, the sky brilliantly overexposed and combed free of clouds. Jory wasn’t sure which day of the week it was, Wednesday maybe, or Thursday.

  She remembers a side door and a faceless young man wearing a dark, slightly too small suit who led them down an arched hallway that smelled of antiseptic and carnations overlaid with a faint cedar odor. They were made to sit behind a thickly gauzed red curtain in something called the “private family alcove,” a tiny room to one side of the chapel where everything on the outside could be seen only hazily and at a red remove. It was silent and dim in the alcove and the close smell of the flower arrangements on either side of them made Jory feel that something was expected of her, something that she would not be able to deliver. When she had imagined this moment, last night, at home, in her bed, she had thought that something might occur here today that would make all of this seem vitally, indisputably real. That seeing the looks on other people’s faces would cause her own to adopt a similar expression, that her face and feelings would then mirror theirs, and that Grace being gone—this was how she thought of it, as Grace being gone—would become, through imitation or symbiosis, something acknowledged, accepted, and possibly even almost borne. She could see now how laughable, how absurdly idiotic that idea had been.

  Faint minor-key organ music played from somewhere, although from where Jory was unsure, since there was no organ to be seen. A small group of people filed silently past the red curtain and sat, hushed or occasionally coughing and gazing toward the front of the chapel in the short rows of hardwood pews: Rhonda Russell and her parents, Ms. Lindbloom, the guitar man from Hope House, Detective Hewett and his wife, and Mrs. Kleinfelter. Laird was there, along with Rhea and her sister Connie, as well as Jude Mullinix, who sat straight-backed and all alone in the last pew. Jory had watched as these people made their silent way past the alcove’s red-filtering curtain, and she had seen their faces, even though they apparently could not see hers.

  Grip was not there. Neither were nine-tenths of the people from their church. The Quanbecks had not been allowed to hold the service in their own church, for reasons—Pastor Ron had said, clearing his throat—that should be obvious. Jory’s mother had slapped his arm hard when he said this, even though Pastor Ron was standing in her hospital room holding a cup of coffee. The burning coffee had then sloshed out of the cup and down his pant leg, but no one, including her father, had apologized or volunteered to clean it up. And so it wasn’t Pastor Ron who now read the eulogy or even Brother Elmore; it was a smiling white-haired man with scrubbed ruddy skin whose neck bulged out over his starched shirt collar. Jory would remember the man’s reddened and practically nonporous skin as if she had examined it every day, as if she had looked upon his beaming, rubberized face her whole life long. The man claimed that Grace’s middle name was Marie, not Mary. He liked using Grace’s full name, as if that were what people had called her, and each time he did, Jory’s mother took a small intake of breath that sounded almost like a hiss. “Grace Mary,” her mother would whisper loudly, her voice surely penetrating past the mesh curtain. Jory’s father did nothing to stop her, but sat with his head down, not even looking at what was going on. He would occasionally stretch his hand out toward Jory’s mother, as if he were going to touch her, but then he would apparently change his mind and instead let his hand hang there in the air for a minute before slowly drawing it back.

  The white-haired man spoke on: “As Paul said in Philippians 1:21, ‘For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.’ And indeed, fellow mourners, though our hearts are very heavy today and filled with sorrowing, it is a joyful occasion for the one who has passed over into God’s abundance. For she has gone to be with her Lord, and will live forever in a place where there’s no pain or grief. No disease or death. Only joy everlasting with her bridegroom, Christ Jesus.”

  The white-haired man leaned forward and beamed at his small audience. “The angels in heaven are celebrating today at the addition of Grace Marie, Heaven’s newest bright and beautiful star.” Jory’s mother seethed. She was sitting on one of the padded folding chairs to the left of Jory and was wearing a dark oxblood-colored dress that almost matched the curtain they were sitting behind. Jory had never seen the dark red dress before today. It had buttons in the front, but they were done up incorrectly. Her mother had been let out of the hospital only this morning. The doctor had said that she could come to the funeral, but that she should probably return to the fifth floor of Good Samaritan tonight. The fifth floor of the hospital was where they kept people who “just needed a little time to recuperate.” This was what her father had told Jory three days ago. Her mother was now busily ripping the funeral program into tiny pieces. Jory peered down at her own program. It was engraved in gold letters with her sister’s name across the top and several lines of writing below:

  GRACE M. QUANBECK

  December 7, 1953–November 22, 1970

  ~A Rosebud~

  When a teen is lifted to her heavenly father up above

  Those left behind might ponder the depth of His great love,

  The sadness that we feel is so immense

  That we are tempted to question God’s good sense.

  Why not take just those whose time has run,

  Whose days have been long beneath our sun?

  But you see—God needs most the bud that has yet to bloom

  To fill heaven’s air with youth’s sweet perfume,

  So today as a new young angel sings on high

  Those of us left below must learn to say good-bye.

  Jory placed her program under her leg. Her mother’s was now a drifted pile of white confetti on the floor. Frances was leaning forward and avidly watching the proceedings going on outside of the red curtain and kicking her feet, in their black Sunday shoes, against the metal rung of the folding chair. Jory had a sudden impulse to turn to Grace, to nudge her with her elbow and point out the terrible rhymes in the program, but with a sensation as swift and terrible as an elevator’s sickening, disorienting drop, she realized that Grace was not here. She was the only person with whom Jory needed to speak or be next to or even look at and she was the only person with whom Jory could do none of those things. She wanted Grace to explain what was going on and what all of this meant and how best to live through this experience—which was what Grace had always done for her—but her sister was gone. She had gone somewhere that Jory could not follow and she had thoughtlessly left no instructions or help to show the way.

  Jory’s mother now began silently shaking her head back and forth and then she stood up and teetered on her high heels through the torn pieces of her program, stepping past Jory and Frances and their father and stumbling slightly in her rush to get out of the private family alcove. Frances stood up too and tried to start after her mother, but Jory grabbed her by the coat sleeve and held her sister fast. Their father seemed incapable of noticing any of this and merely sat, his head hanging down in a way that was completely unfamiliar to Jory. He looked like someone else’s father. Like any other father in the world, but not hers.

  The same young man in the ill-fitting suit who had ushered them into the Good Shepherd Funeral Home now led them back down the arched and antiseptic-smelling hallway. As they walked, he murmured something about “greeting the other mourners in the reception area,” but her father had shaken his head so vigorously that the young man had said nothing further and allowed them to escape unaided through the chapel’s outer door. Jory squinted in the brilliant glare of the parking lot, looking blankly at the scattered cars lined up and waiting for reanimation. Her mother was already sitting in the front seat of the green Buick and Frances now dropped their father’s hand and ran toward the car. Behind Jory, the chapel’s door opened and shut with a sound like a
nail being pulled out of wood and Jory turned and saw Mrs. Kleinfelter buttoning up her gray wool coat and stepping out onto the pavement. The two of them stood looking at each other. Suddenly Jory crossed the space between them and was pinned firmly to the scratchy front of Mrs. Kleinfelter’s coat. She breathed in the faint odor of naphthalene, boiled potatoes, and waxy dust even as she simultaneously registered the fragility of Mrs. Kleinfelter’s shoulder bones, her soft arm flesh, and the cobwebbed nature of her hair. Mrs. Kleinfelter held Jory close and stroked her head as if it were made of something breakable, and then she pulled back from Jory and took her by the arms. “I’ll take care of So Handsome until you’re ready to come get him,” she said. “But just until then.” Jory shook her head and gazed blindly at Mrs. Kleinfelter’s face. At the small pearl earrings clipped haphazardly on her earlobes. “I can’t,” Jory whispered desperately, her voice caught somewhere far back in her throat. “I can’t do this.” Mrs. Kleinfelter grasped Jory’s upper arms so tightly it hurt. “You can,” she said. “And you’re going to.” Jory could feel her own mouth falling, crumpling into something terrible. “Please,” she whispered, “please help me.” Mrs. Kleinfelter gave Jory’s arms a final squeeze and took a step backward. “The worst part’s already over,” she said in the firmest voice Jory had ever heard her use, “and you’ll live through the rest.” Her face took on the look of most impartial truth telling. “You’re the kind that can,” she said. Jory tried to swallow. “Let me stay with you,” she begged. Mrs. Kleinfelter glanced over at the green Buick. She shook her head, but Jory could see that this thought was not new to her. Mrs. Kleinfelter took a further step backward and then she turned and, without looking back once, walked with stiff purpose toward her truck. A fierce wind now gusted and blew. Jory could hear her father starting the Buick’s engine, but she continued to stand watching as Mrs. Kleinfelter climbed up into her old truck and then closed the door behind her.

  At the cemetery, her mother absolutely refused to get out of the car, and Jory and Frances and their father had had to hold hands and walk, leaning into the glaring brightness of the November wind. They picked their way through the cemetery’s slightly frozen grass, moving carefully past the blocky squares of granite headstones, as Jory tried to keep a tight purchase on the hem of her skirt. The white-haired man had gotten there ahead of them. He now stood waiting beneath a pagoda-like structure that had been erected over a small dark hole that had been dug in the ground. The hole was next to a double headstone inscribed with the names of Jory’s grandparents: Gilbert Clayton and Eunice Opal Quanbeck—Faithful Servants of the Lord—Now Gone to Their Glory. The white-haired man was holding a large black Bible down against his thigh and his tie kept blowing up and over his shoulder. Jory watched as he finally gave up and set the Bible on the ground next to the hole in order to capture his tie and pin it beneath his suit jacket. He held out his hand as they approached and her father had to drop Jory’s hand to shake his.

  The white-haired man smiled and said something, but his words were blown away in the wind. Jory had no clear memory of what happened while he spoke, except that the wind made whipping sounds on the open pages of his Bible and the bottom of her dress would not stay down no matter how she grasped at it. She could feel a terrible need to laugh rising up in her throat—a tearing, tickling sensation that made sweat suddenly break out on her forehead.

  The man stopped speaking then. He closed his Bible and tried to plaster his hair back into place across his scalp. Then he bent over, and as Jory watched, he opened a large tan-colored rectangular box and picked out the delicate pale blue urn that held her sister’s ashes. He held it out toward her father.

  Frances tugged fiercely on Jory’s hand. “Is the angel baby in there, too?” Her bright peeping voice rang out and then was just as quickly whisked away. No one answered her.

  Her father took the urn and cupped it in his hands. He held it just slightly out from his body and examined it, smoothing his large hand down one side as if it were a beautiful but skittish horse he was trying to bridle. The white-haired man nodded, indicating that their father should kneel and place the pale blue urn into the hole, but her father seemed unable to believe what was being required of him. He faltered and stepped backward with the urn instead, holding it tight to his chest. “No,” her father said, and he took another step backward, away from the small dark square cut in the earth. “No,” he said, and then he turned toward the car, carrying the urn half beneath the flap of his suit jacket, as if someone might try to steal it from him.

  Jory could hear the white-haired man calling after her father, but she, too, had turned and taken Frances’s hand and was pulling her along after their father, who was now heading back toward the car, striding ahead of his daughters and not even waiting for them to catch up. The wind snatched and tore at Jory’s dress and at her eyes and they filled so that she could barely make out her father’s outline as he continued to march ahead of them, never even turning around once as Jory tried to call out to him. She could feel Frances trip and lose her balance and then begin to cry as Jory continued to drag her across the lumpy and frozen ground of the cemetery; she no longer cared what happened to any of them and hadn’t since that moment in the hospital. The universe had opened up and revealed its own perfectly blank face to her own, returning her gaze with a flattened emptiness that stretched on and on and on—a world so wide and featureless and open, so dark and formless, that light never pierced it: no sun, no moon, no stars. And it now seemed entirely possible that two girls and a stooped man carrying a pale blue urn could stumble mutely on across the face of it forever, seeking a home, or at least a resting place, and finding none.

  Part Five

  Sunny San Diego

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”

  It was the end of March and unseasonably warm the day that Jory’s father told her that her mother was going to go stay in California for a while. She would be staying at their aunt Annette’s in San Diego, and she would be taking Frances with her. Jory and her father were sitting in the front yard in two of the lawn chairs, which she had set up with a certain amount of hopefulness. The sky overhead was becoming a deep and shadowy blue, and at her father’s announcement Jory felt a wave of heavy torpor washing over and through her.

  “What if Mom doesn’t come back?”

  “Oh,” her father said, “I think she will.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Her father turned his head toward her. “She can only tolerate Aunt Annette in very small doses. Plus, she hates California.” He smiled weakly.

  “Maybe she’ll like it more this time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There will only be two of us.” Jory could hear the catch in her own voice.

  “Only for a little while.” Her father gazed up at the sky. After a moment he raised his hand and pointed at a tiny pinpoint of light that had just appeared.

  “Please don’t tell me about the stars, Dad.”

  Her father lowered his hand and then held it in his lap. He wore a small look of hurt and dismay.

  “I don’t care about the grandeur of the universe anymore, and neither should you.”

  Her father said nothing. He made no objection, even to this blasphemy.

  Jory felt a band of something tight inside her give a twinge and then break and snap free. “There are ants that are alive. Ants! And stray dogs and murderers and insane people and psychopaths and people who only have brain stems and can’t even think. And retarded people and crazy people. People who shoot other people and kill them and torture them. They’re all alive. They get to be alive.” Jory stopped as if finally choking on her own vehemence.
She shook her head. She shook her head again and looked her father full in the face.

  The night was settling in now—the sky was shifting from light to dark with a disconcerting urgency. Her father’s eyes looked abnormally bright, but that could have been because of how dark everything else now was. He continued to stare at her without speaking.

  “Mom’s never going to come back,” she said.

  She could hear her father’s sudden intake of breath.

  “I want to go live with Mrs. Kleinfelter.” Jory felt as if she had reached out and pinched her father, hard and with complete deliberation.

  “What?” Her father held perfectly still in his chair.

  Jory couldn’t seem to say any more. It was as if she had held these things in for so long that now there was nothing more to be said. There was no more explanation needed.

  “No,” her father said. As she had known he would.

  “We made her do what she did,” Jory said. “It was our fault. Yours and mine.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence before her father spoke. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Jory,” her father said in a tone that was sad but also held a note of sternest warning. “I already told you that I don’t ever want to discuss this.”

  “It’s true, though,” she said. “And I don’t care what you say. We should have just let her stay with Grip. We should have just let her do whatever she wanted.”

  “She did do whatever she wanted.” Her father’s voice grew suddenly sharp and so pointed that it seemed to be hurting him to speak. “She got her way completely.”

  Jory sat in her chair. She thought about what her father had just said.