Runaway Saint

by Lisa Samson

  “Bel, come get your bag,” Mom calls.

  My aunt’s mouth curls at the corner—the smile from the photo. Before moving, she glances at her seat belt buckle and at the door handle, as if plotting her course, deciding in advance how to navigate unfamiliar devices. She loosens the seat belt and lets the tensioner pull it clear before laying her hand on the door latch, which releases with a click. Aunt Bel turns to me, eyes sparkling, as if to say, See, it works.

  Aunt Bel walks around one side of the car and I go round the other, meeting Mom at the trunk. My aunt’s blond hair is cut quite short in back, down to her chin on one side and barely lower than the ear on the other. Her bangs are cut short too, awkwardly so, as if she might have done it herself. She’s the same height as my mother, just shy of my five foot five, but her body is all angles—hips and elbows and shoulders—making her seem rather taller. She wears a navy flower print dress that stops short of the knee and a mossy cardigan with the sleeves pushed up her forearms.

  “Thrift store chic,” I say. “Not bad for a missionary. On me it would look ridiculous—but on you … And you have the figure to carry it off.”

  I only realize I’m babbling when she fails to respond.

  “There’s just one bag,” Mom says, indicating a green nylon duffel with bellows pockets on the side. Aunt Bel lifts it by the shoulder strap, her body arching under the weight. When I go to take it from her, she shakes her head.

  “Is that everything? Let’s go inside.”

  She follows me onto the curb, but the sound of the slamming trunk breaks our stride.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I ask Mom.

  “I’d better not block traffic,” she says with an apologetic laugh, though there aren’t any cars behind her. “I’ll let you two get reacquainted. If you need anything, leave me a message at the farm.”

  Despite my pleading looks, my mother gets in the car and pulls the door shut. She smiles back at me and then frantically pulls away.

  When I turn to Aunt Bel, she is staring up into the tree, as if she hasn’t seen one before.

  “Want to come in?” I ask.

  She smiles at me—a wide, almost grinning smile, not the Mona Lisa side curl.

  What you would never guess from a photograph is how expressive she is, her whole face—no, her whole body—contorting itself to convey her meaning. The sort of skill a woman might pick up if she found herself alone in a foreign country, unable to communicate via words. Come to think of it, she’s only uttered a single word in my presence, when she said hello.

  “Can I please take that for you? It looks heavy.”

  Aunt Bel regards the bag, her eyes following the line of the shoulder strap—again, as if my saying something has called her attention to a previously unremarked object. She shrugs the strap off, testing the duffel’s weight in her hand, then passes it to me, radiating gratitude the whole time. Does she not talk? I feel a sudden panic. Maybe in all those years overseas, she’s lost her ability to speak English.

  “Aunt Bel, is everything all right?”

  She looks herself over, as if checking. Then nods.

  “You’re sure?” I ask, willing her to speak.

  She nods again, then adds a single word: “Yes.”

  Relieved, I escort her inside—even though a confirmed vocabulary consisting only of hello and yes is not much to be relieved over. No wonder Daddy wanted her out of his cottage. It must have been like trying to entertain a rock. My voice blathers on autopilot, down the “welcome to your new home” highway, ushering us all the way to the stairs before I realize she’s not with me. Aunt Bel stands just inside the threshold, taking in the house: ceiling, woodwork, floors, furniture, everything waiting its turn to be noticed.

  “You can come in,” I tell her.

  She takes a step or two, then stops. “Lovely.”

  “You have to use your imagination. I know it’s a bit of a dump right now, but we have big plans, and I think the fundamentals are good, the bones of the structure—”

  “Lovely,” she says again, meaning it, and suddenly I feel ashamed for making excuses for the place, for deflecting a heartfelt compliment and revealing my insecurity in the process.

  And compared to Kazakhstan? Even in my eyes it looks better.

  I set down her bag at the foot of the stairs and walk her around the ground floor. Right away she notices the maple floors with inch-wide strips of inlaid mahogany about eight inches from the baseboards. “They’re my pride and joy,” I tell her.

  She runs the tips of her fingers around the swirl at the top of the newel post at the bottom of the steep stairs, which I’m sure aren’t up to code these days. “Oh, Sara.” The light coming through the two windows, tall enough for me to stand on the ledge and still have a good two feet of space above the top of my head, shines in her eyes.

  And once again, I see my home in a new light. Not the Sara-you-bit-off-more-than-you-can-chew light, but the one that says, in Aunt Bel’s tone, “Lovely.” Because it is.

  “As annoyed as I get at Finn, he’s really the only one who’s trying to love this house like she should be loved, even though he might seem to be the Casanova of renovation.”

  Aunt Bel just nods.

  Unfortunately we hit the kitchen and I have to bite my tongue. Aunt Bel takes it all in, her eyes darting, and while she says nothing, she gives the impression of barely contained pleasure, as if the stripped-away suspended ceiling and the flicking overhead lights are right up there with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the nooks and crannies of our hundred-year-old house a source of limitless wonder.

  Is she simple? I find myself wondering. Is that the problem? Has something happened to her, some kind of emotional-growth-stunting trauma? Because she doesn’t just look young for her forty-odd years, she seems childlike.

  I’ll ask Finn when he comes home if it seems like she’s been the victim of some past head trauma. He can spot that sort of thing a mile away.

  I escort her up the steps and down the hallway to the spare bedroom, pulling the empty dresser drawers out so she can see where her things are meant to go. The conversation is so one-sided I find myself overexplaining things, and using the tone of voice you’d use with a grade-school kid.

  “The upstairs bathroom is just across the hall, but you have to be careful just inside the door, because we haven’t quite fixed the tile yet.”

  She puts a hand on my wrist, pausing my monologue.

  “Sara,” she says, turning her voice up at the end, introducing doubt.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  Her first complete sentence, pronounced in a tone of great intimacy, as if we’re about to confide our secrets to one another.

  “Of course. Aunt Belinda.”

  “Do you actually remember? Can you remember anything about me?”

  “Yes,” I say, but now I’m turning my words up at the end, making them into questions.

  “You remember what I was like?”

  “You were … nice?”

  As she considers this, her whole expression changes. The smile fades and the eyes cast inward, as if she’s gazing into the past and seeing—what? Lines emerge on her placid skin, the crease of etched smile-lines like parentheses around her mouth, deltas opening around her eyes, as if whatever she sees is aging her in real time. As if she’s staring into some kind of black hole, an abyss.

  “Aunt Bel, are you okay?”

  “I was nice,” she says, the darkness lifting. “Yes, I suppose that is true.”

  “I’ll let you settle in,” I tell her, backpedaling toward the door.

  Aunt Bel pulls open one of the side pockets of her duffel bag, removing something wrapped in fabric.

  “Here,” she says, holding it out. “Because I was never there when this would have made sense to you.”

  I take the object and unwrap the folded material. Inside is a doll about the length of my hand, made of porcelain with glistening glass eyes. It has red, curled
hair that looks like a young child has brushed it well past its expiration date and cheeks painted hot pink. A coarse lace dress that would serve equally well for communion or burial swaddles around—I lift up the dress—a rudimentarily carved wooden body.

  “The woman who gave that to me had carried it with her as a girl, when her family was deported to Kazakhstan. Stalin deported a lot of people there. She was my friend. My only friend for the longest time, the only person I could talk to. You should have it.”

  Objections come to mind—it’s too precious, too laden with sentimental value, and way too creepy by half, the kind of doll that watches you when you sleep, the kind you throw away only to wake up and find it perching on your chest.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Aunt Bel approaches me and takes me by my forearms. “You know you’re a good person, don’t you, Sara? Did you ever feel like you weren’t?”

  I stare into her eyes, and I see in them a brave resolve and acceptance I could only dream of having. I can’t help but say, “Yes. I try not to think about it. But doesn’t everybody feel that way?”

  “They do.”

  As I descend the stairs, the click of her door shutting hits my eardrums and relief ripples over me. What just happened? I place the doll on the table downstairs in front of the television, then collapse on the couch, exhausted. Being with Aunt Bel is like being in the presence of a light that burns too bright. Something about her makes you put up your guard, and then she finds her way underneath it despite your careful engineering.

  I’m not sure I like such intuitive candor around my house. Bare bulbs? Fine. Suspended ceilings? No problem. Soul-probing questions? Sorry. Wrong number. Call again.

  But it’s too late now. Aunt Bel is in the house, one more person to worry about. She will not be unobtrusive. Like the rusty hulk at the center of my studio, she will be unavoidable. We will bump into her wherever we try to go. And in my heart, which forms its intuitions without hard evidence and yet is rarely wrong, I am convinced that in giving Aunt Bel shelter, I have made a mistake I might soon regret.

  5.

  A Stranger Here Myself

  The Aunt Bel who drifts down the stairs, the childlike Aunt Bel, seems so different from the serious woman who saw deeply into my soul an hour ago. I can’t help questioning whether I understood her right. Uncertain how to proceed, still nervous from earlier, I play hostess—but badly. Can I get you something to drink? Are you sure? And have you eaten? You really must be hungry—Until she finally agrees to hot tea, at which point I’m forced to confess to not being sure we actually have any.

  “That’s okay,” she says, watching me closely, like she’s not sure what I might do next but knows it is certain to be wonderful.

  It makes me uncomfortable, that look, giving me her full attention. I could be the only other person in the world, not just the room, judging by those eyes. A part of me has gone through life thinking all I wanted was the world’s undivided attention—its praise, its love, its undying admiration. Paying attention to all the work I do, the things I make, even my thoughts and opinions for the admiration of others. But here I am getting a taste of the real thing, the full attention of just one person, and I’m not sure I want it anymore.

  It feels like being wrapped in a quilt knitted of candy-coated claustrophobia.

  Whatever it is, I already know I can’t live up to it.

  “Let’s get out of the house,” I suggest. Finn, who has yet to meet the newest member of Drexel’s Curiosity Shop, went to the studio to work on the Iron Maiden after church.

  In the open air, the strength of Aunt Bel’s presence is somewhat diluted. She has other things to occupy her: kids chalking pictures on the still-wet pavement, a couple of neighbors inspecting the portable grill on their stoop to figure out why it won’t light, the coming and going of Lycra-clad cyclists in twos and threes on the opposite side of the street. She knots her fingers together, taking everything in.

  “How are you adjusting to being back?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know.” She wriggles from the bottom up, loosing herself from an imaginary net. And her eyes constrict the way they would if something cold and unpleasant had crawled across her bare skin. Her I don’t know seems just a placeholder for other words she is unwilling or unable to utter.

  “You’ve been away a long time. What was it like?”

  Again she pauses, as if I’ve posed some unanswerable riddle. “Everything’s changed,” she finally admits.

  “Well, maybe in the winter, when the heat is reliable, you’ll feel differently.”

  “I can’t say.”

  The Grove Street Artisan is my third place, the notch in my dial between home and work, the place I end up when I don’t intend to end up anywhere, so that’s where I take her, snagging the same table by the window that Mom chose on my birthday. I introduce her to Madge, which serves the added purpose of distracting her long enough for one of the girls behind the counter to make my latte. Despite having already eaten, Aunt Bel devours a blueberry scone, then returns to the counter and, after some indecision, brings back a mammoth sugar cookie.

  The sweet tooth must run in the family.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I’ve always wondered what it was like, staying over there.”

  “What do you want to know?” She breaks off a piece of cookie and takes a bite. Her eyes grow large and she nods. “These are good.”

  “The story I heard was that after your summer trip, you liked it so much that you decided to stay. It’s hard to imagine not coming back, though, at least to visit. You must have really …”

  “Really what?”

  I shake my head. “I dunno—found your calling? Loved being a missionary?”

  Her mouth drops open. “Is that what they’ve always told you?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  She stares at the crystals of sugar that have fallen on her napkin. “I guess you could say I had a calling I needed to fulfill.”

  “Did you?”

  “Fulfill the calling?” she asks.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There’s only one person who can be the judge of that.” She waves a fragment of sugar cookie in the air, dismissive. “What’s a missionary, anyway? Everybody’s a missionary, or nobody is. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

  “Wait. So you weren’t a missionary?”

  She shrugs. “Who’s to say?”

  Who’s to say? What does that even mean in this context? Why would I be told she was a missionary if she wasn’t? I’m confused, but observant enough to get the strong signal that she’s not going to enlighten me further.

  “Well, according to Grandmom and Grandpop’s definition, then.” Believe me, that definition made me decidedly not want to become one, and that definition always made me question my own dedication. It still does despite hundreds of sermons to the contrary, sermons about the spirituality of a life well lived, about calling and giftedness.

  The Mona Lisa smile returns. “Sara, there isn’t a missionary alive that’s a missionary by their definition.”

  I laugh with relief. “You’re not what I expected,” I tell her.

  “Were you thinking Saint Francis?”

  “Maybe Judson Taylor.” My grandmother actually had a framed picture of the famed missionary to the Chinese people in her prayer closet, the place she went for at least an hour each day to pray over all the prayer cards she collected at the missions conferences she attended over the years.

  “Oh, Lord!” She barks out a laugh. “Heavens, no!”

  “My husband, Finn—who you’ll meet—he was calling you the Nun. I don’t know, I guess when I think of somebody who’s been a missionary for twenty-some years, I imagine she’d have her hair up in a bun, with no makeup and a big denim skirt.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.” She smiles.

  “I know it’s an unfair caricature. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t know anyone like you.”<
br />
  “What am I like?”

  Someone prone to asking uncomfortable questions?

  I veer away from any answer that might have some depth. “You know, you’re stylish. I mean, look how you dress. It kills me you can wear what you wear and look great in it. I’d look like such a poseur,” I say. “Like I was dressed by the Internet.”

  She looks at her clothes, as if noticing them for the first time, and I can see that she’s surprised by what I’ve said.

  “I’m not stylish,” she says. “I just wear what I like. Things that come to me.”

  “That kills me even more.”

  “The dress I found in the hallway of my apartment building. I never knew if someone dropped it on their way back from the laundry or threw it out.” She places a hand up to her mouth and stifles a laugh. “I never had the nerve to wear it over there. I’ve had it for ten years too!”

  “That’s insane!”

  “What? No. I just didn’t want—”

  “No. I don’t mean that you’re crazy, Aunt Bel. The situation is. Don’t be offended. It just means I find it all so … unusual. I can’t relate.”

  “Oh.” She nods once. “Okay.”

  “What about the sweater?”

  “This sweater, my friend Katya gave it to me.” She pinches the fabric between her fingers, remembering. “That makes it special. I think of her.”

  “The friend who gave you the doll?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “That was someone else, a long time ago.”

  “Well, maybe Katya can come and visit you sometime.”