“I’m so horribly sorry,” said the priest. “I wish there were more we could do. If you think it would help, I could offer counsel to you and your husband. To preserve your privacy, I could even come to your house.”
George saw his mother’s lips twist, as if she were laughing at the young man, but she didn’t laugh. She just said, in the same flat, dead, empty voice she’d used before, “Thank you for your kindness.”
They went home. That very evening, his mother made telephone calls to people up north, and when George’s father returned a few days later, she told him she had arranged for George to go to boarding school. To George’s amazement, his father agreed to the plan, and even though it was the middle of the school year, fifth grade, George went. His mother rode the train with him. They ate from china plates—china on a train!—as, out the window, state after state blurred by, smears of green and brown punctuated by steeples and roofs and occasional roaring tunnels. Before his mother left to go back home, she hugged him hard, whispered, “I love you more than life itself,” in one ear and “Be brave,” in the other.
George came home for three weeks out of every year, one at Christmas, one in the spring, and one in the summer. He never saw his father hit his mother again, but he never stopped hating him, hate upon hate upon hate. For eight years, George stockpiled rage. On his eighteenth birthday, two things happened: he found out he had been accepted into Yale and he came into his inheritance, money left to him in a trust by his mother’s parents. His mother called him at school to wish him a happy birthday. A week later, she overdosed on sleeping pills. No one called it suicide, but George knew.
“She waited until I had the means to take care of myself,” he told Edith. “When I went back for her funeral, I told my father that I was finished with him, to never contact me again, a request he honored. Six months later, he remarried and moved out west. A year later, he was dead. A stroke. Apparently, he had been an alcoholic for decades. I never knew. I can’t remember even seeing him take a drink. Isn’t that strange?”
In the dark, Edith nodded.
“He cried at her funeral. Can you believe that? Somehow, I couldn’t shed a single tear, but that bastard cried like a baby.”
There was a catch in George’s throat, his first display of emotion. Edith tensed, waiting for more, but the moment passed so quickly and completely that she wondered if she’d imagined it. His dispassion should have put her off; no one should have been able to tell a story like that without sorrow or anger, but she wasn’t put off. She was relieved. She didn’t want to see this man as fragile. His breaking down, her comforting him, the intimacy of it would have been a sham, would have looked too much like love. She wished he hadn’t told her the story of his parents; if she could have given it back to him, every word, she would have.
He left a few hours later. That night, Edith removed her clothes and surveyed her body in the mirror and felt, for all the world, as if she were staring at a stranger. For more than four months, she had made love to a man she did not love, and not loving him had been good. But it wasn’t good anymore. She wasn’t ashamed; she was just finished. The next time he came, without malice, she asked him to leave and to never come again, and without malice, he had gone.
Chapter Twenty
Clare
As soon as Dev got into my car, he said, “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” not in the lions-and-tigers-and-bears manner you might expect with such a grim list but gleefully and accentuating each word with a karate chop to the dashboard.
Unaccountably, it was exactly the right thing to say.
I’d been nervous on the drive from Edith’s house to Dev’s mom’s house. Not sweaty-palms, heart-clanging nervous; no high school orchestra warmed up inside my brain as sometimes happened. But my thumbs fluttered; my legs vibrated; three separate times, I caught myself humming a song that had nothing to do with the one coming through my car’s speakers. After ten miles of this, I was faintly exasperated with myself. By thirty, I had become the most irritating person I had ever met. And by the time I hit fifty, I was threatening to pull over and dump myself out on the side of the highway.
“You’re just lucky you’re driving,” I said aloud, “or you’d be gone, baby, gone.”
While it was true that I had spent a little face-to-face time with Dev at my nonwedding, it had been very little time, and for most of it, we’d been with at least one other person, so our attention had been divided, although looking back, I understood that the other people had been a minor distraction compared to the elephant in the room, the elephant being, of course, the fact that I could not possibly, in this lifetime or in any other, marry Zach. So when you factor in the other people and the elephant, Dev and I had almost not been together in real life that weekend at all.
Since then we’d been together on the phone, yes. In texts, yes. We’d been comfortable and jokey and chatty and even, once in a while, serious, more and more so with each conversation or exchange, until, by the time I pulled up in his mom’s driveway, we were very nearly back to the business of being the Dev and Clare of old, minus being in love, of course. Which is exactly why I was nervous because, as everyone knows, nothing makes you feel stupider than being familiar and totally at ease with a person over the phone, only to be stilted and shy and awkward when the two of you are finally physically in the same room. Or car. Cars are so much worse.
But Dev’s litany of bodily injuries turned out to be—if you’ll excuse the lame joke—just what the doctor ordered. “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” and—poof—the awkwardness vanished.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said, starting the car.
“Br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face,” said Dev, more or less, and then again, “br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face!”
“Wow. This is going to be a long drive,” I said.
He said it again, loudly.
“Increasing the volume never helps in these situations,” I pointed out.
He said it again.
“You know what would help? Vowels.”
He rapped on the side of my head with his knuckles, lightly but not that lightly. “Clare. Pay attention.”
As I rubbed my head, he began to say it again, very, very slowly, but before he finished, it hit me. “Oh!” I said. “Oh, oh, oh!”
“Finally. Geez.”
“The shadow ledger! The stuff after the town abbreviations! She’s listing their injuries!”
“Yup,” said Dev.
“That’s wonderful! I mean, it’s awful. But how did it take you so long to figure it out?”
“And by that you mean, Way to go, Dev!”
“You start medical school in two months, at a fancy-pants school, no less. Correct?”
“What’s your point? And I would not call it ‘fancy-pants.’”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not 1910 and I’m not ninety-seven years old. For starters.”
We went on like this for very close to all of the four-hour trip. Somewhere in there, I noticed that Dev’s hair had grown out since the nonwedding and that he was back to doing the thing where he’d rake it impatiently off his forehead with his fingers as if it had fallen there just to annoy him; and, after we’d stopped to switch places, that he still drove with just one hand on the wheel despite all those years of my admonishing him about safety, safety, safety; and, when dusk fell outside the car where we sat talking, that his eyes, when he glanced over at me, matched the sky exactly.
Even though it was just after ten o’clock at night when we got to my parents’ house, everyone was there. Besides my mom and Gordon, there were Dev’s paternal grandparents, Ingrid and Rudy Sandoval, and Dev’s maternal step-grandparents, Ellie and Dr. B. Brown. They all lived in the same neighborhood, the one I’d moved to with my mother when I was eleven, the one in which Teo and Cornelia and their brothers and sisters had grown up, and the one Dev had visited so often that it was his neighborhood as much as anyone’s.
> The first time I talked to Hildy about these people, and their children and their children’s children, and their various relationships to one another, she had pretended—very convincingly—to tear her hair out by the roots and had then thundered, “Enough! From now on they are ‘Leftover Night.’”
“What? No. Why?” I’d said.
“On the seventh day, God created Leftover Night! Except it wasn’t God. I think it was my dad or possibly my mom or maybe my older brother, Stephen. Anyway, in our house someone would cook dinner six nights out of seven, and on the seventh night, whoever’s turn it was would have to make a dish that used up all the leftovers from the other nights. So what we’d get was this mishmash of stuff that should absolutely not have worked, but somehow almost always did. That’s your family.” As usual, it was hard to argue with Hildy. From that moment on, we called them Leftover Night.
How bone-deep sweet it was to be with them, to sit at the big dining room table together eating the dishes they’d all brought to share, everyone running roughshod over one another in conversation, ending one another’s stories and sentences, mercilessly interrogating and forcing food on me and Dev. I met Dev’s eyes a couple of times across the table and could tell he was thinking what I was thinking: that it was good—as it had forever been and forever would be good—to sit at that table and be Clare and Dev, the doted-upon children, beloved by all these loud, teasing, bossy, outstandingly kind people.
After dinner, Dev and I took a walk around the neighborhood. It was well after midnight. The streetlamps burned, their blue-white glow pooling, at regular intervals, on the white sidewalks, but most of the windows of the solid, broad-shouldered, brick and stone houses were dark, their lawns spreading solemnly around them. A mailbox stood sentry at the end of every driveway. The big trees sang with cicadas. Dev and I knew every house. We knew every tree and all the places where their roots buckled the sidewalk. We’d known for so long we didn’t even realize we knew; it almost didn’t count as knowing. Every block of this place was jam-packed with the kind of memories you don’t have to conjure up because you are them. Here, nostalgia was rendered moot. Walking here, Dev and I could be fully in the here and now.
“It’s crazy what we’re doing, isn’t it?” I said, with a laugh. “Just heading off to Richmond, like we know where to look and what we’re looking for.”
“We’ll trust our instincts. Hey, I told you that scientists are taking intuition seriously, didn’t I? Have faith, Hobbes.” Then he shrugged and smiled down at the sidewalk. “But, yeah, it is a little crazy.”
“Fun, though,” I said, after a pause. “Even if we don’t find anything, it’s fun to be doing this.”
Dev walked along, looking straight ahead with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything for so long that I began to get nervous again.
“I mean, I think it’s fun to be doing this,” I said.
“Together,” said Dev, giving me a gentle—fairly gentle—elbow to the ribs. “Get it right. It’s fun to be doing this together.”
“Clare and Dev are on the case!” I said, shooting my fist in the air.
“Dev and Clare,” corrected Dev.
We kept walking.
“We’re lucky,” I said. “To have all of them. Our family. Even when we’re not with them, we have them.”
It was the understatement of the century, but I counted on Dev to know what I meant.
“They’re a constant,” he said. “Like pi. Wherever you are, pi is pi.”
“A constant. Like a turtle’s shell, a home you carry around with you everywhere.”
“That, too,” said Dev.
* * *
I was the one who thought of churches. Later, Dev would always say he was, but I was the one who brought up churches in the first place, and since we were all about intuition, even though I hadn’t specifically mentioned churches as a place to look for clues, the fact that I’d mentioned them at all was clearly my intuition subtly pointing us in the right direction. Or more or less the right direction.
We were driving through Richmond, following our intuition because that’s what we’d agreed to do and also because we didn’t exactly have anything else to follow, when I said, “There are a lot of churches in Richmond. It seems like on every corner, there’s a church.”
It was just a tossed-off comment, the kind of thing you say when you’re driving through an unfamiliar city searching for you-have-no-idea-what located you-have-no-idea-where. But about thirty seconds after I said it, Dev snapped into full-on ponder mode, brows knit, face still, lashes batting, eyes focused. I could almost see his brain working: holding an idea like a Rubik’s cube, turning and twisting it, click, click, click, until all its parts were in the proper place.
When I saw the last click happen and the tension leave his expression, I said, “Okay, give it to me. Not just the end result, but the whole train of thought.”
It was something we had always done, a way, maybe, to stand inside each other’s heads for just a moment. I remembered my own voice saying to Cornelia and my mom about Zach, “Sometimes, I think he won’t be satisfied until he climbs inside my head and lives there.” But this was different. Zach wanted to take possession, at least that’s how it felt; Dev and I just wanted to watch the machinery turn. “It’s like being inside a clock tower,” I’d told him once, and he’d replied, “Or like watching the doughnut machine at Krispy Kreme.”
“Okay. Sanctuary,” said Dev. “What’s the first thing that comes into your head?”
“A safe place,” I said. “A haven.”
“Same with my head. But I’m pretty sure—and I’m not great at Latin—but I think it comes from the word sanctuarium, and I think—arium means a container, like a terrarium is a container for a little piece of the earth, and sanctu means sacred. So a container for something holy.”
“Like the sanctuary of a church,” I said. “The part where the altar is.”
“Hey, whose train of thought is this anyway?”
“Sorry.”
“So where did I go next? Oh, right. Like the sanctuary of a church, the part where the altar is.”
I punched him in the arm.
“Ow. Okay, so maybe that’s the original meaning of the word, but now it also means—”
“A safe place. A haven. Like I said.”
“I thought it before you said it, but fine.”
“I said ‘churches’ before you thought any of this, but fine.”
Dev rolled his eyes. “Moving on. I’m just guessing but the word probably came to mean that because churches became safe havens for people.”
“Oh, oh, like Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church! In Philadelphia! I went there!”
“If that was a stop on the underground railroad, you just completely hijacked my train of thought,” said Dev, shooting me a baleful glance.
“Oh. No. Nope.” I shook my head decisively. “That’s not what it was. It was something—else.”
Dev heaved a very large sigh. “Anyway. Back in the fifties, before they had women’s shelters—at least, I don’t think they had them then or definitely not many—where would a battered woman go for sanctuary?”
“Yes! We should go look at churches,” I said, whacking the dashboard.
“It’s still a shot in the dark, just to walk in and ask if there’s anyone who remembers anything that might help us. But it’s less a shot in the dark than driving aimlessly around the city.”
“And what do we have to lose?”
“Nothing. Let’s do it. We’ll look up churches on our phones and just start.”
For the next three hours, that’s what we did, went to church after church, skipping the ones built after 1953, and asking the people we met there whether they knew anything that might suggest that the church was part of an organization, possibly secret, that helped abused women escape to safety. I suppose we could have called instead of going, which might have saved time but wouldn’t have felt nearly as much like an advent
ure.
By the fourth church, I’d mostly given up on finding out anything about Edith’s shadow ledger guests, but I liked the churches anyway. There were grand ones with domed ceilings and gold fixtures and dazzling stained glass; there were simple white clapboard ones with tidy box pews and no-nonsense wood floors; there were historic ones with brass plaques dropping names like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. We went to the church where Patrick Henry gave his “give me liberty or give me death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention, and both of us got the shivers imagining him there, burning with audacity and eloquence, as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington listened.
I loved the symmetry of the pews, with the aisle straight down the middle. I loved the vocabulary: apse, chancel, nave, pulpit. I loved the small, tucked-away chapels. I loved how stepping into each cool, hushed interior was immediately peaceful, like morning coffee at your kitchen table or sitting in your backyard watching the fireflies begin their light show in the lilac bushes along the fence. I loved how I could say these things to Dev and he smiled and only made fun of me a little but not like he really meant it.
Everyone was nice, and no one knew a thing about John Blanchard or Edith Herron or an underground railroad for abused women.
And then a secretary at an Episcopal church said, “We need more places like the one down the road. Everyone in danger should have a safe harbor, a sanctuary.”
Sanctuary.
Her use of the word set my intuition pinging, only faintly pinging because it was a completely reasonable, even obvious word choice, but a faint ping is better than no ping at all. I looked over at Dev, and after a second, he shrugged and nodded.
“Why not?” he said.
The Andrew Pfeiffer Women’s Center and Shelter had just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, which made it pretty old but not old enough for our purposes, and all the people who worked there had clearly been born decades after the 1950s, so, right away, it seemed like a dead end. A very, very good and worthwhile dead end, though, because the Andrew Pfeiffer Women’s Center and Shelter turned out to be a kind of clearinghouse for hope. In addition to sanctuary, the center offered mental health services, legal advocacy, a twenty-four-hour hotline, homework tutoring for children, and financial counseling. The staff there helped women get jobs and mortgages and go back to school. They even allowed dogs.
I'll Be Your Blue Sky Page 18