by Deeanne Gist
“Okay,” she said in an unsure voice.
She rode silently in his car for a while, her hand on the handle. Finally, like the teenager she was, she could no longer maintain silence and broke into conversation, telling him all sorts of stuff about her little sister, a girl named Stephanie who lived in foster care. “She likes seafood,” she burbled. “I’m going to buy her a leather jacket for Christmas.”
Her apartment was a studio in a run-down building above the freeway. His heart vanished when he heard the cockroaches scatter as she turned on the light, and he saw the downturned shame in her soft, round face. Why had he thought it would be better? She was a teenager fresh off the streets.
“It’s clean,” he offered.
There was a bed made with one blanket and a flat pillow. A tiny kitchen had a saucepan in the strainer on a cracked linoleum counter. There was an opened box of Cheerios on the upper shelf and a stack of three tuna cans. “I like tuna,” she explained. There was an impossibly tiny refrigerator that he discovered later had exactly enough room for a pint of milk, a small jar of mayo, and one container of take-out Chinese. A single shelf held three mismatched coffee cups, two with broken handles. The main room had built-in shelves that stood for dressers and, incongruously, a bright pink plastic beanbag chair. “A friend gave me that,” she said of the beanbag chair.
She dropped on the floor the duffel bag that contained her dancing clothes and ridiculous plastic wedge high heels. He said good night, and he tried not to think why she looked sad when he left.
On the way down, he got stuck in the old rickety elevator with the folding accordion doors and had to be rescued by an old woman with black starling eyes who told him all about the pet clinic next door and how they performed experiments on the animals they stole.
The hot tea he drank after meals now tasted like mud. The shower in the morning after a long run felt like a waste of water, the run a waste of time. His sermons—his one source of pride, because he had such a strong voice—now felt like artifice. One night he put down his Bible and looked out the window blinds of his rectory apartment and thought about the layers of life a man can live without even knowing his shadow lives on the floors below.
He hungered to see her. It was not a sexual hunger or a romantic hunger. He just wanted to see her.
He knew she was using him in the way that she used everyone. He knew it wasn’t personal; that was how she had learned to get by. She delighted in getting him to pay for things, yelling, “Score!” when he did, and he would turn to look at her, so happy to have a thrift store book or a cheap pair of tights, and feel a welter of emotions inside.
Little by little she told him her past, but when she saw it diminished her in his eyes, she stopped. Instead, she became the brassy jokester, the laughing one. He liked her best when he took her places he thought she had never been, like the Japanese gardens or the zoo. Only later would she fess up that other men, at other times, had taken her to those places. For a girl of sixteen, she had a surprising breadth of experience, from living in a commune with her parents as a child to hitchhiking down the coast by herself. He thought of what he was doing as a child—hiding in his bedroom, reading the Bible, and fantasizing about being the pope—and felt embarrassed.
She hated her parents. “Fucking hippies,” she said with scorn. “Communes of destruction.” She kept a comic pinned to her wall that showed an angry hippie threatening to bust out of his commune because of the crabs, and she laughed every time she looked at it. He had to ask her what it meant by crabs and was repelled at her artless description.
He tried to reason with her about her work, if you could call it work. “I’m the one in power,” she argued almost belligerently. “They’re the ones who sit there and give me the money.”
She talked about her future as if people could reinvent themselves like snakes shedding their skins. “It may not be so easy,” he said, but she just looked at him like he was the one who didn’t know anything.
There were things she never discussed. There were strange scars on her palms, like slashes. It wasn’t until much later, when he took the job at the prison, that he realized these were scars from defensive wounds. She had a soiled white rabbit’s foot she carried with her everywhere, and a creased picture of a blond girl she said was her best friend on the streets who went missing during the time when a notorious serial killer was active.
She confused him. Who was she? Who was this laughing child, this woman, this victim of abuse, this well-read teenager, this dancer?
“How come I can’t be all of them?” she asked him plaintively when they had driven all night through the silk black skies above an old country road, just driving and driving, and he voiced this thought out loud. “Why can’t I be all?”
That’s what he thought of later, but he also thought about those little moments—the cans of tuna, the pink plastic beanbag chair, her hips under the club lights, the turned-away eyes, and most of all, her awareness of those things in herself—that made him realize she was the first person who truly existed for him.
And so he fell in love for the first time. Not with her, necessarily; he fell in love with life.
The minute they did it—her mounting him in, of all places, the pink plastic beanbag chair—he saw her pull away from him like water going down a drain.
She had pushed it in so many ways, coming on to him. The more time they spent together—the more he really came to know her—the more she upped the sexual ante, flirting, rubbing herself on him, and joking and teasing, combing his hair with her fingers at the back of his neck. And then the minute she got it, her eyes went dark and distant and she was gone.
He tried to hold her in bed afterward, unsure how to reach her. He was in numb shock for what he had just done. He wanted comfort. She curled backward against him, the shock of her naked body pouring warmth down his stomach, but he felt she was a million miles away, lost in another place.
Later, he woke up to find her reading. She was back in the pink beanbag chair, wearing only a pair of old men’s paisley boxer shorts, her worn copy of Watership Down cradled in one hand, the glasses she refused to let anyone see—huge pink insurance frames, the cheapest the eye doctor could provide—on her face. Her soft hair was gathered in a knot on top of her head. And her thumb was in her mouth.
She sucks her thumb, he thought. He closed his eyes before she could catch him seeing her like that, so naked, and for a long time his heart pounded in his chest like he had done something wrong.
The cool wind has picked up and shakes the leaves of the walnut and elm trees. The lady has wrapped her cardigan around her. The soup is gone, and the rolls are crumbs.
“What happened to her?” the lady asks.
He cannot tell her this—he does not want to tell her this.
“It lasted for months,” he begins.
He could not face how much he meant to her and how much she tried to hide it. It was in the spaces between her writhing in bed and the searching, hopeless looks she gave him and the blankness when she stared at a full plate of food he had cooked for her. It was in his growing knowledge that she needed him and he was not able to accept her.
“And she knew,” he says, his voice empty with grief.
“How did she know?”
“I told her I would not take her to my apartment.”
He had been trying to explain that he couldn’t take her to his rectory apartment, how unbelievably irrational it was for her to ask. He said it like he wasn’t trying to escape a past himself. How they had two lives and both had meaning, how he was trying to wrestle with being a man of the cloth and a man who loved her.
“Trying to wrestle?” she had said acidly, her little-girl eyes gone cold. “Trying? When does the real action commence?”
He was shocked at her meanness. It was as if the venom of her life, the hatred of her past, all came out against him. The more he felt accused of failing her, the more the implacable resentment returned to his heart. Only now it w
asn’t just resentment against life. It was resentment against her.
As always, afterward, when they fought, she came to him and with urgency sought to wrap her legs around him. There was such a sad desperation in her lovemaking that he was repelled. “I want to love you,” he whispered against her hard little chest, and he knew it sounded like a criticism—that the person she was could not be the person he needed to love. He felt her slip away in his arms to that cool, distant place, and this time he did not fight for her to come back.
He told himself he was taking a sabbatical. A much needed vacation. A respite.
No one in the church batted an eye. The truth was, they didn’t care. Even blue-haired ladies know when they are despised.
He wimped out and told her at the last minute. He had taken her to dinner for her favorite meal, steak and potatoes and lots of bread and butter and salad. She still ate like she was a homeless kid, as if the calories might disappear at the next meal.
It wasn’t until they were back at her place with cockroaches fleeing under the light switch that he casually remarked he was leaving town for a few weeks.
“Where?” Her voice was shocked and bereft.
“Belize.” It was just a vacation, he told himself.
She backed up across the floor, bewildered. In her face he could see the terror. He was just another man who had used her and exploited her and opened her legs and now was leaving, only he had done a hundred times worse: He had opened her heart.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he whispered.
She shook her head, and in that moment he saw the cheap pink beanbag chair and the dried Cheerios in the cereal bowl on the counter and he knew he was right to leave. It wasn’t her poverty or her past. It was the shame she carried like a black cloud, a shame that reminded him of himself.
“I’ll come back,” he said, uncertain if it was true.
He says this to the lady, who still sits at the picnic table, wrapped in her cardigan. Her face is warm, her eyes on his face. He feels an immeasurable strength in her.
“You cannot ask what I did in Belize because I cannot remember. Did I read books? Cook? Eat? It doesn’t matter. I was running away and knew it. When I got back to the airport after a whole month gone, I felt no better than when I left. Except I knew it was time to leave the priesthood.” He pauses and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “My first call was to my superior. To let him know I was fallen and would be leaving, no questions to be asked. My second call was to her apartment. She was gone. The apartment was vacant. The landlord said she had just disappeared. I went to the club, and they said she had vanished. No one seemed to care. It was like she didn’t matter, and I guess she didn’t matter.”
He is crying and doesn’t realize it. The tears run down his cheeks.
The lady watches him cry. “She was gone,” she says with finality.
“Yes. Gone. People go missing every day, but with her, it didn’t matter. No missing persons reports. No parents to call the police, no one to even notice. I had never known how alone she was before, not really. But she was. She was completely alone except for me. And I left.”
“Did she choose to say goodbye?” the lady asks.
He smiles a little at the kindness of this phrase. “If anyone ever wanted to say goodbye, she did. She jumped off a bridge. The police pulled her out a week later.”
The lady tries to decide if she should touch him, while the silver tears flow down his cheeks. She reaches across the picnic table and picks up his cold hand. She holds it as though she is holding a cup.
He wipes his cheeks. For the first time, she sees a bloom in his pallid skin, as if he is coming back to life. The poison is leaving him.
“She was pregnant.”
“Oh, you,” the lady says, but the surprise for her is when he turns to let her see his face, she is crying, too.
The yard is so big, so full of bright pulsating colors—flowers so yellow they color your eyes, thick green grass that squeals between your teeth when you make it into a whistle, clotted racetrack dirt from one end to the other, and if you put your head down, you would surely hear them, the horses that run under that ground, all golden and lithe in the sunlight.
The men in the yard are hard and bright even on the darkest of days. They stand under the corrugated grandstand and look at the rainy sky, and oh, how that must feel. They see the giant drops gather on the metal poles, and they know if they licked the poles, they could taste the metal, and just by knowing that, they do taste it, and deep underneath them in my cell, I can taste it, too.
The yard smells when it rains in the summer. It smells so strong that I can smell it way down in the depth of this dungeon. I can smell the dung from the golden horses rising through the dirt, and I think about each clod of mud and how it contains the history of the world: shards of mica and stone, glossy ribbons of clay too faint to see, the arm and leg of Eve, the pulsating pull of Adam. The taste of minerals can fling us out to sea and above to the skies. The world can be in one clod of dirt.
With every exhalation, I find a way out of this enchanted place. My breath rises to the clouds, and some tiny, microscopic particle joins with the clouds and condenses, and when it rains, that tiny part of me is returned to this earth—far away, maybe, in another place like China.
They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China.
The warden stands outside my cell. I peek at his face from under my blanket.
He looks sad. I wish I could say sorry about his wife having cancer. Unlike other men in the dungeon, I would mean it.
He is holding a letter stamped with large letters: LEGAL MAIL. This can mean only one thing. Someplace in the labyrinth of the legal system, my case has been flagged for appeal. I shake my head under the cover and turn my face to the wall.
“I know,” the warden says soothingly. “But I have to give you your legal mail, and you have to sign that you read it.”
I nod carefully under the cover.
He pushes the letter through the slot and steps respectfully away, turning his back. I scuttle forward to grab it and then hide under my blanket to read it.
The letter is from an attorney. He has been assigned to represent me through some defense fund. He wants to meet me, take on my case. He says he plans to hire the lady. They will get me out of here, get me back into general population. They will save my life. We can get you off death row, he writes. You can live.
If I write him back, he says, he will come. I will be chained in the Dugdemona cage. I will see the scrap of sky.
“Whatever you want,” the warden says, his back still turned.
He drops the pencil stub through the slot. I scurry forward again and retreat to my cot with the pencil. I pick up the letter and sign that I read it. Then I write one word to the attorney: No.
I push the letter through the slot and wait back on my cot, my blanket over my head, until the warden retreats.
After he is gone, I realize I am still holding the pencil stub. I turn it over in my hands and taste the lead at its end.
The lady and the priest are sitting on one of the old wooden benches next to the stream that runs alongside the prison, where it widens into the pond. A century before, this is where they hanged people. The gallows are long gone, but marks from the wooden frame remain gouged into the soil. Still, it is a gracious place, cupped with trees, the tranquil water littered with the dust of summer. The lady has brought a bag of stale bread and is feeding a voracious group of mallards.
Was she sitting here, hoping the priest would see her as he left for the day? Yes. And he did, hope lighting his face when he saw her, walking faster than he knew.
They have been talking for over an hour as the sun begins to set, lighting the dust on the water, talking about her work and his and the
men they both serve.
“You never talk about your family,” the priest says to the lady.
Her heart stops. She looks into his face and sees only kindness. He has not said it out of malice or even curiosity. He is reaching for her, she can see.
She takes a breath and throws a crumb at the ducks. “My mother lives in a home. She has what people nowadays call intellectual disability.”
“Oh.” His face is calm but questioning.
“Mental retardation,” she explains.
“Like York’s mom.”
She shoots him a glance. “Yes.”
He holds his hand out for a bread crust. She puts it in his palm and feels the softness of touch.
“Is it hard, knowing?”
She shakes her head and then stops. “Maybe. I can understand.”
He looks at her profile. There is something hidden in her face. “Your father?”
The question hangs there. “Which one?” she answers at last.
Something in her voice tells him. She expects he will recoil, but he doesn’t. His face is full of tenderness. He looks at her for a long time. Her face is very still, her eyes on the pond.
“Another thing in common,” he says softly.
She nods, a barely perceptible blink.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
She turns to him and lets him see right into her. Her eyes are luminous and bright and full of knowing.
“After a time,” she says, “I liked it.”
The lady watches the priest cross the parking lot and get into his battered older car. She wonders if she went too far but is too exhausted at the moment to care. I can accept your shame, she thinks. Can you accept mine?
The lady drives the long freeway back into the city. She thinks about her painful efforts at dating. The few attempts she made at telling men ended in disaster. She got wounded watching the disgust in their eyes, the recoil from her truth. She told herself this was the way it would be, that she was destined to live alone. Then came the priest and the warmth in her belly.