Runaway Saint

by Lisa Samson

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “What happened?” My mom is highly intuitive. She just doesn’t always choose to act on it.

  “You tell me. It’s why I’m here. I need to know what’s between you and Aunt Bel, Mom. Really.”

  She nods once and jabs her shovel down into the dirt she’s just overturned. “You know, when Bel was gone, I never had a thought this would happen, that you’d ask questions I never wanted to answer. I thought we’d buried it all for good.”

  I sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs. The sun is driving in at a slant as if it’s stopping on its heels.

  She bends over and disappears into her tent. I hear her setting her two cups on the small table that serves as a kitchen counter of sorts, then the pop of the lid on her springwater jug. She hands me a cup of water and eases down in the other chair.

  “Okay. Go ahead. Ask. It’s not going to be any easier in a few seconds, a few minutes, or a few hours from now.”

  For the first time, I look at my mother as though seeing another human being, not just the woman who gave birth to me. I see someone who’s run from her sorrows, just like her sister. She just didn’t go as far. But maybe she went just as deep. In fact, I know she did. Look at where I’m sitting. If this isn’t another country, I don’t know what is.

  “What happened between you and Aunt Bel? Mom, I don’t know why, but I feel like this is the linchpin to everything that’s been going on between everybody. There’s a tension running underneath the surface that’s palpable at times. Daddy taking up for Aunt Bel, you keeping your distance. And while I admit she’s eccentric, she’s not disagreeable. She doesn’t even have poor hygiene, for that matter.”

  Mom smiles at my joke. “No. Your grandmother made sure we were always extremely clean.”

  “So why all this?”

  “She ran away and deserted us, baby.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that. You know I have. And it’s not good enough. Sisters get mad at each other, but they get over it. You and Aunt Bel loved each other once, right? So tell me why she ran away, Mom. Tell me why your sister ran halfway across the world and almost never came back. And even more importantly, why nobody cared enough, or was angry enough, to go over and bring her back. How did you and Grandmom and Grandpop come to care for her so little?”

  Mom flinches, then finishes her water in four gulps and sets the cup beside her chair. “You were four when Aunt Bel left. Do you remember much about her?”

  “Just flashes here and there. I remember this young woman with beautiful, long blond hair. And she had these flashing eyes, so blue, and, Mom, I just remember that they always lit up when I came into the room.”

  “It’s true. She loved you more than we realized she would. Both your father and I remarked that we’d never seen that kind of devotion in an aunt to her niece, at least not at that age. I mean, she was only fifteen when you were born.” She laughs a little. “I remember one time I couldn’t get ahold of her and had to ask a neighborhood girl to babysit. You would have thought I did everything I could to dishonor and offend her. On purpose.”

  We laugh together.

  “She seems so much more subdued now, Mom. Maybe that’s part of my problem. I’m having a hard time reconciling this Aunt Bel with the old one. I almost don’t know what to do with her. It’s kind of like biting into a piece of cake, only somebody forgot to put in the sugar.”

  She screws up her face.

  I stretch my legs out in front of me, the sun warming my bare shins and the sides of my calves.

  “Okay.” She grinds her palms against her thighs and drags them down toward her knees. “I don’t know how to go about this in any other way than just to say it. There’s no gentle way to say it, I suppose.”

  I lean forward.

  “Aunt Bel killed your brother.”

  “What? What brother?”

  “You weren’t an only child, baby. You had a little brother. His name was Jason, and he was only three months old when he died.”

  Jason!

  “And Aunt Bel killed him? I don’t understand. Was it an accident?” Was this the accident?

  “Yes. A careless accident, which makes it all the more hard to bear. It was so unnecessary.”

  And my mother, my crazy mother who never made sense to me, comes into a focus so sharp, is bordered by a line so crisp and perfect, Huey might have pressed her. “Oh, Mom,” I say. “Oh, Mom.”

  She leans forward into her palms, the backs of her hands slowly coming to rest on her knees, and she crumbles into the person she’s been trying to escape, the person we all seem to be, the person who fears to look on herself in this state, because if we do, in the recognizing and the greeting, we will never escape who we really are. And if we are never who we are, we can never truly be rejected, or to blame.

  Some things hide in corners and don’t matter. Crumbs that make their way between the sides of the stove and the countertops, hard-to-reach fuzz under the bed. Even a dead bird in the attic, if undisturbed, won’t harm anyone.

  But what we’ve got here is a case of black mold. It’s not going anywhere and in fact, it will someday take over with its cancerous spores and “I will not go on being ignored” attitude. I don’t know how to proceed. And I remember what Huey said. We’ve never really suffered. Not like this.

  So I kneel by her chair, rest my forearm along her back, and run my fingers through her white hair. My mother, all this time, was only being a woman who had lost a child.

  I wait as the evening shadows lengthen and she does not move. Twilight approaches and she does not move. The plum of dusk ripens into the fruit of the night heaven, bursting with stars that carry the seeds of who we are. I move her hair off her neck, kiss its nape, and whisper, “I love you, Mom. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  She looks up. “I love you too, baby.” And returns to her grief.

  “She was only doing the best she could,” I cry into Finn’s shoulder.

  The thing is, he’s never had to console me, not really. He married a basically nonemotional woman who took care of her own stuff, who experienced marriage as the icing of an already baked cake. And now, here I am, basically adrift for what seems like no real reason that’s mine to claim.

  “It’s only part of the story,” he says after I calm down, after I comment about what pain does to people, how unfair it seems.

  “I know. But here’s the thing. It’s enough. My aunt has been harboring this guilt and fear, enough guilt and fear to keep her away for almost three decades. My mother, on the other hand, has been keeping this secret down inside of her where her wound lies, and the two together fester. To be honest, I can’t believe how well she’s done with this all these years.”

  “Amazing how your opinion of someone can change once you know what the load is they’re carrying.”

  “I had no idea. Poor Daddy too. And he continued to try so hard.”

  “So what’s your next step?” he asks gently. “Talk to Aunt Bel?”

  “Yes. And then, somehow, we’ll have to get those two back together.”

  “Were they close before, your mom and aunt?”

  “I can’t even answer that question. I have no idea.”

  “Wow.”

  I try to sleep that night, but my brain won’t slow down, I keep seeing all sorts of accidents, car accidents, leaving the baby in a hot car (ugh), maybe a choking incident where something solid was fed to the baby too soon. My dreams aren’t much better. Why have I heard the truth and it doesn’t make me feel any better?

  Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?

  I peek way down inside me at my imaginary friend. My brother. My brother Jason.

  After leaving a message at Happy Hideaway for my mom the next morning to tell her I’m thinking about her, I head out to my father’s place in Timonium, a drive that takes me about thirty minutes, mainly because I’m in no hurry. I pull my car up in a driveway that’s had its macadam recently refreshed and cut off the engine. With the windo
w rolled down, I can hear the wind blowing in the trees. Otherwise everything is quiet. At the back of the property, the waters of Loch Raven sparkle through trees just starting to sprout their leaves. It smells like the lawn has been freshly mowed too.

  The kitchen screen door of the small home, lacquered in a dark brown and sporting a couple of stained glass windows, squeaks. I step inside a small, highly utilitarian kitchen, the place Dad makes his cakes and jellies. At the end of the room, in front of a large bay window overlooking the reservoir, rests his spacious drawing board and his high-backed stool. I loved watching him work when I was little.

  He sits there now, swiveling around, a slippered foot resting on the footrest. “Hey, doll. Come on in. Cookies atop the fridge. Milk’s inside.”

  Yes, he makes me cookies and milk.

  “You mind if I go talk to her?” I ask.

  He stabs his thumb at the backyard. “She took over my shed.”

  I head out the back door, down a slate path lined with lavender not yet blooming. Of course Dad made the shed beautiful, its siding the same as the house, but no stained glass windows. He got on a woodworking kick awhile back and is still threatening to make more than a hobby of it.

  Aunt Bel is tucked into the corner next to a drill press, sitting on a folding chair with a paperback book open in her lap.

  “Hello,” I say.

  She watches me enter, saying nothing.

  “Look, Aunt Bel, I came out here to talk. I want to apologize for that night, for throwing the shirt at you the way I did. That was wrong. I knew while it was happening. You forgive me?”

  She tilts her head. “It was your favorite shirt.”

  “Don’t make excuses for me,” I say. “The thing is, we want you to come back. Me and Finn, we both do. You don’t want to stay here.”

  “Walt says I can stay in the shed if I clean it up.”

  “But you can come back to my place and not have to do any of that. Your room is still waiting.”

  “Sara, you’re being very nice. I appreciate you coming. I don’t think it’s for the best, though. I think … when I went away, there were consequences. Not that I intended them. I made choices, yes, but they didn’t feel like choices at the time.”

  “You did what you thought was best.”

  “No,” she says. “I went for the wrong reasons. I’ve told you that already. I stayed for the wrong reasons too …” Her voice trails off.

  “And you came back for the wrong reasons? Is that what you think?”

  “I came back because I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Come home with me, Aunt Bel.”

  “The funny thing is, that first month in Kazakhstan, I thought I’d found my calling. Remember, I told you: the life of service. They were so selfless, the other volunteers. When you put us all together like that, with a single purpose, we all became selfless. It made us better than any of us would have been on our own.”

  “There’s nothing quite like finding your group.” I think of that crazy crew at the Firehouse.

  “And then they split us up and we became ourselves again—at least, I did. It took a long time after that before I finally realized the calling on my life. And when I found it, I tried to be faithful, Sara. From the outside, I’m sure it looked like I was. But in here—” She puts her bandaged hand against her breast. “In here I was always fighting. It was too much, Sara. Too much for me to take.”

  “The service?” I ask.

  “No.” She beckons me closer. “I said I thought my calling was to serve. Such a noble purpose! To put others ahead of yourself, to forget yourself. I wish it had been that, Sara. I could have done that. I proved it at the beginning. I needed to.”

  “Then what?”

  “My calling was not to serve. The longer I was there, the more things that happened … I began to realize that the Lord had called me to suffer.”

  “Aunt Bel, don’t even say that.”

  “It’s the truth. You don’t like to hear it—well, I don’t like to say it. But my child, Sara, my little baby boy. He had a father who didn’t love him, grandparents who abandoned him, and he had me, a hopeless mother. And he was sick, Sara, right from the start. So small and underweight. Slow to develop. I knew there was something wrong, but once he was older the doctors said he would be fine.” Her eyes narrow. “They know nothing, the doctors.”

  “What was wrong with him?” I ask.

  “His heart,” she says. She reaches out with her undamaged hand. I crouch beside her, clamping it against my chest. “When he was only five, just five years old, I went outside to hang the laundry and there he was in the grass. Like he was sleeping, with his legs drawn up, his back turned toward me. I knelt beside him and tried to wake him, but he was gone.”

  As she speaks her voice fills and empties itself, rocking with emotion then dry as dust, as if the words transport her back in time to the traumatic moment of Michael’s passing and then fling her forward into the far, far future, where the death can be observed with chilling detachment. She channels grief the way a jaded veteran might channel violence, not devoid of passion exactly, but with too much experience to let it reign.

  “It must have been terrible,” I say. “I can’t even imagine what you went through.” I want to ask her about my brother, but how much can a person take in one sitting?

  “That was only the start. Sara, I never opened my heart except to have it broken. I never loved without being hated in return, never understood anything without being misunderstood. I recognized what was happening to me, and where it came from. I thought of Job and tried to be comforted. Job did nothing, yet everything was taken from him. Why? For the glory of God, whatever that means. To prove a point. His family taken, his body broken, his friends turned against him—and I tried to tell myself, however impossible it seemed, this was good. No, not good. You should never call evil good or you’ll soon find it impossible to tell the difference. Justified, that’s it. I told myself what was happening to me was justified. That it served some greater purpose, and I should be content.”

  “You’re so hard on yourself.”

  “There was Katya, eventually. She understood. She had her own suffering, you see, and marked people like us, we recognize each other.”

  “Sergei told me about her,” I say. “He said she was ‘sick in the head.’ ”

  An icy smile twists her lips. “Sick in the head. Yes. Other pastors there would say she had a demon in her. A mental illness. Katya suffered from depression for a very long time. Who could blame her? I struggled myself. But with her, the situation was … clinical. Sometimes they gave her medicine that helped. Her illness was too strong; it always found ways around the medicine.

  “She was always so fragile, Katya. Several times I expected her to slip away, to succumb to her madness, and then she would rally and I thanked God for it. She was the one thing God had permitted me to keep, you see. The one thing he had not taken or twisted or turned around on me. When you have nothing, you can be very grateful for just one thing. When you have nothing to love, you can give all you have to just one friend. I had made a kind of pact with him: You can do what you like as long as I have her. I don’t care, just don’t take her away.”

  “You really loved her.”

  “Oh yes. She was a widow, a few years older than me. She had been married to one of the local pastors—the man who started the church where Sergei is now. He died of leukemia—I barely knew what that was—and already Katya’s troubles had started. She would seem normal, happy, and then … she would just let herself go. The dishes would stack up at the sink, the dirty clothes piled high, and her eyes would burn with this frantic energy. I had never seen anything like it. She seemed feverish, but was cool to the touch. One day I visited her apartment and she was shoveling earth into the bathtub. She was going to grow vegetables, she said.

  “Then it would pass. I would say a prayer to God: Don’t go too far. You’ve done enough. You don’t need to push her any closer to
the edge. And for a while, he would listen. I felt good then. All of the suffering I had gone through—and there are things I haven’t told you, things I would never tell you or anyone—it didn’t matter anymore. I could even tell myself it was worthwhile, because through suffering I had gained some influence. I could pray for Katya and he would have to listen. He owed me that much.”

  She straightens her spine and grips the arms of the lawn chair. “But he wasn’t listening, Sara. Or if he listened, he did what he wanted regardless. He took her, and in the worst way, the most reprehensible way. When she seemed to be all right, I took her with me on a journey to the South. I had been living for years in Uralsk—Oral, they call it now—and this was the first time I went back to the Caspian, back to where I had first met the Galts. There was a couple there, young missionaries, and the woman was pregnant and struggling. I really felt for her. You can understand why. So I went down to help, and took Katya with me. She had never seen the sea. I thought it would do her good.”

  Aunt Bel rocks back and forth in her chair as she speaks, her expression distant, blank. This is not a story she’s told before. This is still unprocessed grief. She tells it quickly, as if she’s afraid we might be interrupted, afraid something will happen and she will be prevented from reaching the end.

  “The young woman, her ankles had swollen and she could barely move without pain. It was her first child. She hadn’t wanted to have it in Kazakhstan, she wanted to go home. The husband, I think, would have agreed, but they had this way of not telling each other their fears, not confiding. Like someone had told them to be an encouragement to one another and they had both taken the advice too literally. So she would tell him she didn’t think it was too bad, and he would agree that she was probably right. I tried to talk sense into them, and so I was distracted. I didn’t see how bad Katya had gotten.

  “She turned suddenly. She grew very aggressive, very paranoid. That was a sign, you see, when Katya would suddenly hate everyone, suspect everyone. But they were getting on my nerves too, so I didn’t see it. She left the apartment one day and said she was going to go walk along the water. I was encouraged, because I’d never heard such a thing from her before during one of her bad times. She’d barely leave her place. She was gone for hours, gone the whole night, and in the morning they fished her out of the sea. She had drowned herself, Sara. On purpose. I think she did it because I was not listening to her. I was paying too much attention to these other people who didn’t mean nearly as much to me.”