The Circle Game

by Tanya Nichols

  Monsignor stopped at the first row of seats he came to, the back row, and guided Bernie in ahead of him. She genuflected before sitting down, anxiously following all the rules in the presence of the holiest man she knew. The old pew creaked as she scooted down to allow room beside her.

  For a moment, Monsignor simply stared at the altar. “I’ve never sat in this row before,” he said quietly.

  Bernie didn’t know how to answer. She’d sat there plenty of times, usually with some pen and paper doodling or writing notes, anything to help pass the time. She pulled the hymnal from the back of the pew in front of her and held it in her lap thumbing the pages nervously, never looking at the printed pages, just fumbling with the book. The church seemed strangely dark. The fog softened the fractures of light that passed through the colorful stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. No bright stabs of red or blue sliced through the air as they often did on sun-drenched mornings. Bernie was afraid, already wanting to cry, though she didn’t know why. She just knew she was going to, the lump in her throat already tightening. The monsignor was struggling, his face pained and flushed as he gazed up at the life-sized crucifix as if he silently pleaded for help from the wooden sculpture, the lifeless body of Jesus nailed to a cross.

  He finally turned toward her, took the small, blue book from her hands and returned it to its proper place. He placed both of her hands in his, gently patting the back of her right hand. “Bernadette,” he said, “I have tragic news to tell you. Tragic.” His voice seemed thin and small, so different from the one that resonated from the altar announcing the body of Christ, the blood of Christ. “And there’s just no easy way.” Again, he glanced toward the front of the church while he tightened his hold on her thin hands, leaning closer.

  “What is it? Did something happen to my grandmother?” Her nervous eyes narrowed with concern, fear of the tragic news that was coming her way. “Is Noni dead?”

  “No, your grandmother is fine. In fact, she should be here soon. I’ve sent someone for her. Father Harris will bring her to you. It’s your parents, Bernadette. Something has . . .” He swallowed, gripped her hands tighter still, focused his watery blue eyes directly on her face. “Something terrible has happened to your mother. And your father, too, I’m afraid.” He paused again, the thin collar around his neck the only thing moving as his Adam’s apple slid up and down, up and down.

  Every muscle in Bernie’s body stiffened and her spine became rigid as though a steel rod suddenly linked her neck to her tailbone. Her heart pounded furiously from her chest up into her throat and down into her gut. “What happened? Did my dad crash the car? Did he? Are they hurt?” Her body began to rock; she tried to pull away, but the old man held her hands and wrists tightly, keeping her in the seat beside him.

  His voice turned somber and controlled, sounding as he did during communion offering. The body of Christ, the blood of Christ, was all Bernie could hear, but that was not what he said. She strained to hear, to understand, but the sounds of the Eucharist echoed in her ears and she searched the church for somewhere to hide, instinctively knowing she did not want to hear what the priest had to tell her. There should be incense, an organ, more people, a lot more people. The pews should be filled. She didn’t want to be here alone with this holy man. She didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say. No no no no no no no no.

  “Bernadette, you must listen to me. Please. Please. There was no car accident. Something happened at home.”

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ.

  “Your neighbor, Mrs. Quentin, called first. She knew you were here and didn’t want you to go home to . . . to . . . I’m afraid . . .”

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ.

  “No,” she finally said loudly, shaking her head from side to side, pulling away from his strong hands, her eyes filling with horror, her stomach turning and raising in her throat. “No,” she said, even louder still. The church walls closed in, suffocating her with years of lingering stale incense and dead saints. Jesus in his crown of thorns, lifeless stained-glass stations of the cross, a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, all spiraling and whirling about her as the world seemed to slip out from beneath her pew.

  “I’m so sorry, but your mother and father apparently had a . . . a . . . a violent altercation, and they have both passed . . .”

  “No,” she said again, almost screaming this time, her voice echoing in the empty sanctuary. “No, you’re wrong.”

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ. The words of the Eucharist haunted her, pain, death, redemption. “No, no, no,” she repeated again and again.

  “Bernadette, please hear me. I need to tell you what happened.”

  “No.” Her head jerked violently from left to right, refusing to acknowledge him, refusing to accept his words, revising them in her head, changing them to the Last Supper, take this cup. Her eyes roamed the room, searching for an exit, a way out.

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ.

  “I wish I could spare you this. I wish I could find a way.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close as the tears came and patiently waited for her sobs to pass into weak submission. When she was at last still, the struggle ended, he delivered the painful news as though the message were a grave secret, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “Mrs. Quentin said she heard shots, two of them. She rushed over to see what happened and found your mother. Your father, he apparently shot . . .” He paused, took a deep breath, and finished it, quickly. “Bernadette. Bernie. Your parents are both dead. I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

  She jerked away from him, covered her ears with her hands, and continued to shake her head from side to side, refusing to accept his lies, unable to imagine what had happened in her home while she had sat in the cafeteria and peeled the perfect orange her mother had put in her lunchbox that morning.

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ. The body of Christ, the blood of Christ.

  She should have been there. It wouldn’t have happened. She screamed and cried, “I want to go home. I want to go home now. I want to see my mom. Take me home now. Please.”

  The priest’s painful words smoldered and burned deep inside her, erupting into a fear and terror she had never known, and in the end, all she really heard was a call to the Last Supper.

  The body of Christ, the blood of Christ.

  She wanted it to be like any other Sunday. She would walk behind her mother, in front of her father, a perfectly reverent family, and they would eat the bread and drink from the cup. They would keep their heads bowed and shuffle back to their seats where they would kneel, side by side, hands clasped in front of them, just as they had done hundreds of times, hundreds of times. This was what you did in church. The priest was supposed to talk about everlasting life, give you hope and the body of Jesus, not take everything away. He was wrong.

  “Bernadette, I’m truly sorry.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, weeping, leaning her head on the pew in front of her, her face now wet and hot with angry tears. “He wouldn’t do that. My dad wouldn’t do that.” She stood up, wanting to run and get away, wanting to go home and prove them wrong. Her mother would be there, doing laundry or cooking or watching All My Children on television. Her dad would be at work still, but he’d be home by six, just like every day, home by six. Dinner would be at six thirty. They were wrong. But the priest stood and caught her as she rose to her feet, grabbing her by the shoulders and pulling her tightly to him.

  “Cry, Bernadette. It’s time for tears.” He held her close to him while her body shook with unleashed sobs. He then slowly guided her back down into the pew beside him.

  “I don’t understand. How could . . .”

  “I don’t understand it either. We can’t begin to understand.”

  They sat side by side and waited there until her grandmother, confused and bewildered with bitter grief, arrived at the church with Father Harris. She would take her orphaned granddaughter
home with her where they would weep in each other’s arms all night.

  Bernie would never remember leaving the church.

  The days that followed would always be a jumbled mess in her memory. Her world had descended into the densest of fogs, everything disappearing into a silent mist, a black hole of grief and confusion. In years to come, bits and pieces would flash through her mind or appear in wild dreams, especially after drinking too much Tanqueray, but it was mostly a haze of images, nothing clear. Noni falling to her knees at the sight of the dark red stain at the bottom of the stairs where her mother had apparently fallen, a single bullet in her back. The pool of a darker stain on the landing at the top of the stairs where her father had ended it all for everyone. So much blood. How could there have been so much blood? The thick smoke and stench of incense that filled her nostrils for days after the funeral. Two dark wooden caskets side by side in a church filled with everyone Bernie had ever known. Pies and cookies, ham and lasagna, plates of cheese and crackers. Food everywhere. As if eating would fill the painful emptiness that tried to swallow her whole.

  * * * *

  Bernie looked at her grandmother now, old and sad, her weak eyes nearly lost in the drooping lids and dark circles. “I’m sorry, Noni. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Noni was all she had, her grounding through everything, and it pained her to think she had upset her. Since that day, Noni was the only person on earth that Bernie loved and trusted. She was ultimately the person she had lived for all these years, constantly striving to make her grandmother happy, to make her proud. Such devotion was, at times, exhausting.

  “No. You’re right. You wouldn’t have had the life you had. You wouldn’t have lost your mom and dad, none of that, but you wouldn’t be my granddaughter either, so . . .” She waved a hand in the air. “I don’t know.” Her voice trailed off, and her head seemed to tremble more than usual. “I don’t know why things happen, but they happen for a reason.”

  “Noni,” Bernie took her grandmother’s brown-spotted hands into her own and kissed them one at a time, “please don’t be sad.” She sat silently, just holding Noni’s trembling fingers, knowing the memories that haunted her grandmother. “You’re right. This woman probably just wants something from me, like money, or I don’t know, a kidney or something.” Bernie tried to shed a different light on the whole thing, lighten the dark mood and sadness she had managed to stir up in a matter of minutes.

  Noni pulled away and offered a slight lift of the right side of her mouth, almost a smile. “Then don’t give it to her. You might need it when you’re old like me.”

  “Yeah—and what if she’s a nut? You know, maybe she’s been in a mental hospital all this time and now she wants a daughter to take care of her, or something. And how can I do that? I have crazy Noni to worry about.” Again, she tried to get a full smile from the old woman. She should not have dragged these troubles into the room with a bag of candy as her only offering. But Noni was the only one who knew how she felt, who knew what she’d been through. There was no one else to talk to about this.

  “You’re the one who’s,” she raised her right hand and circled her fingers to help explain, “mezza mezza.”

  “What the heck is mezza mezza?”

  “I guess I’m old. That’s not the right word. That means so-so, I mean you’re the one who is kooky. Thirty-seven years old, no husband, still hanging out with an old woman on a Friday night.” She finally broke into a quivering smile and a low growl of laughter, then leaned forward, raising her old-age-spotted hands to grab the younger pair. The four linked hands formed a gentle knot of flesh and bone, embracing fingers and lives as one. “Bernadette, you know I love you more than anything. You’re like my own daughter, but maybe there are things you should know. I don’t know. I’m too old now to help you. Maybe I should have told you more.” Her chin trembled, and the worried look returned again. “Maybe you should meet her.” Noni pulled her hands away, but Bernie only grabbed onto them again.

  “I don’t know. I’m torn. Part of me is just curious, and another figures no good can come from bringing all the past back. Still, maybe . . . the woman from Social Services said to give it a couple of days.” She raised the old woman’s hands to her lips once more and kissed them again before resting back into the faded roses.

  “Are you still cutting out newspaper articles? That might make you feel better.” The chair hummed as she glided the short distance to the table where the neatly folded paper waited. “Here. You can have my paper.”

  “No. I finally quit doing that. Every once in a while I see something and save it, but not often.”

  For years, Bernie scoured the newspaper each night, searching the headlines for stories of suffering and loss, especially murder-suicides, domestic disputes that turned deadly, something to make her feel normal, less freakish. Knowing that she wasn’t the only one this type of thing happened to was comforting. It was a part of her life she never shared, a secret. As far as anyone else knew, her parents died in an accident, and her grandmother took her in after that. She knew some of her grandmother’s friends knew, but no one dared mention it. Ever.

  “Well, take the paper. Maybe there’s something really bad in there to make you feel better.”

  “Okay.” She knew her grandmother needed to do something for her and giving her the morning newspaper was about the best she could do from a motorized chair in an old folks’ home.

  Noni was the only constant person in Bernie’s life. Everyone else from her childhood eventually disappeared, sooner or later, but not Noni. She was always there. When Bernie moved in with her grandmother, she quit her job to be there for Bernie one hundred percent. She took her granddaughter to three different therapists, searching for the one that would say the right thing, anything to get the girl to sleep without nightmares, to go out with friends instead of staring at the television for hours on end. She lit hundreds of candles at Saint Theresa’s, praying for her dead daughter’s soul and the sad and angry child she left behind.

  Slowly, Bernie fell into the very rhythm of Noni, a gradual healing from the constant aroma of garlic and onion in the kitchen, fresh air in the crisp sheets on her bed, the sound of her grandmother’s voice calling her to breakfast, offering to drive her to school, and the certainty that on Friday night the ironing board would be up and Noni would iron a week’s worth of shirts and dresses while she watched J.R. and the rest of the Ewings on Dallas. Like slow lapping waves that tirelessly caress the shore, retreating and returning, never ending, Noni was there. Now, it was her turn to be there for Noni. She owed her that.

  “You’re a smart girl, Bernadette, you will figure it out. So now I want to take you to see Mrs. Gianetta. She has a question about her will, and I told her you would help.”

  No matter how many times Bernie had asked her grandmother not to offer free legal services to the other residents, it did no good. It was just another way for Noni to brag and show her off, and Bernie could hardly deny her that small pleasure. Actually, she couldn’t deny her anything, and Noni knew it. Noni knew everything.

  Six

  1968

  The baby began to cry, a whimper that ruptured into an ear-piercing howl. She was hungry.

  Freddie leaned against the doorframe of the small trailer, looking down at Juicy, then out into the darkness, but never stepping foot inside, where his baby wailed. “Get your shit together. We’re going,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

  “Can I feed her first? She’s hungry.” Juicy laid the baby down on the bed and stood in front of him, naked and sticky with sweat. A slight breeze blew through the open door, fresh and sweet, cooling her down, reviving her a bit.

  “No, I need to get my bike. The guys are leaving soon, heading north, and I plan on going with them. You’re either staying here for good or going now.”

  It wouldn’t do any good to argue with him, to ask for any favors. Things had changed during the last few hours; everything was all upside down and wrong. Juicy yanked
a t-shirt over her head and fumbled around for her underwear, then remembered how the first bunch had ripped them off of her, or maybe cut them, she couldn’t recall now. It seemed so long ago. When she heard Freddie draw a long angry breath, she gave up the search and just pulled her jeans on, wincing in pain as the rough denim rubbed her thighs and pressed on her tender private parts. She pulled a clean diaper from a pink and white striped bag in the corner and dropped it on the bed next to the baby. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice raspy and hoarse, thirsty for a drink of water, anything. “Shhhh. Don’t cry, little girl. Don’t cry,” she urged, her own eyes filling with tears.

  “I said let’s go.”

  “Her diaper. I need to change it; she’s soaked through.”

  “Now.” Freddie turned away and stomped off in the darkness, keys jingling in one hand, the other balled up in a tight fist, ready to fight.

  Juicy picked up her baby, still holding the clean diaper in one hand, grabbed her boots and the diaper bag, and started out the door. She heard the truck starting and ran after him, the baby screaming and bouncing, the bag slung over her shoulder, weighing her down, boots smacking her in the hips, rocks and stickers jabbing into her bare feet. “Wait,” she cried. “Freddie, wait; God damn it.”