Godshot

  “You are my mother,” I said. A reminder.

  I heard her light a cigarette. “You couldn’t say one nice word about me to that church. And now that I’m here, well, I can see you wouldn’t like it.”

  I saw Lyle’s body then, I felt the gummy way the white stuff he put in me stuck to my skin, the way it never seemed to properly wash off. The blood on her bikini, my hand off the blanket, in the dirt.

  “I just want to be with you.”

  She was quiet. Sighed. “He thinks television is the way for me. He said I’m television pretty, not movie pretty.”

  My stomach bubbled. I felt a flu coming on, maybe something I had eaten turned evil. Or like I’d begun to suspect, my motherloss was so real it was becoming a sickness inside me. I dry heaved. I looked around as if there could be a cold glass of water somewhere. I drank some warm Kool-Aid Cherry had mixed with soda and it burned all the way down. “If you could see me,” I said to my mother. “You would come back.”

  “Rick already warned me my own family would be the least supportive,” she said. “He didn’t want any of you interrupting my process of becoming a star. In fact, if he comes back I’ll have to go. Doesn’t like us on the phone.”

  I said, “Mom, I have to tell you something.” But then I thought: What was the something? Was it Lyle or was it that I lay down under him? Was it the Diviners or was it me becoming a phone girl? I couldn’t bring myself to say any of it aloud.

  “Now you can have birthday parties at Cherry’s if you want. You don’t have to be ashamed of our apartment anymore,” she said. “You’re practically an adult. I raised you up and now you’re grown.”

  I had never asked for a birthday party. I had never complained of our small apartment, the fact that of course I would never have a friend spend the night because there was not room in the bed we shared and there were not those fruit snacks with the sweet oozing goo in the centers that every kid seemed to have in their lunches, and I had never cared about my birthday because I cared more for Jesus’s birthday. I had never burdened her with my childish woes because her burdens took up the whole room. I felt angry she was using them against me now, the things I had never asked for. I heard a door slam, a man’s barking voice in the background. The line went dead. I rolled over and threw up in a tin bowl.

  THE NEXT DAY Daisy eyed me, tapped a pen against her lip. “You don’t look good,” she said.

  “My boobs hurt,” I said. “The skin feels like it’s going to burst open. And I’m so tired all the time.”

  Daisy could see the motherloss on me like disease now. My darkened nipples, how my nearly flat chest had become full so fast, little red squiggly lines appearing all over the straining skin. I thought maybe my heart was swelling to burst, pushing its way out from all places.

  “You have a boyfriend?” Daisy asked.

  I didn’t answer. A boyfriend had nothing to do with this.

  “She’s asking if you’ve had sex in real life,” Florin said. “Did you wrap it up or not?”

  TEN MINUTES LATER I was outside the Pac with Florin, sitting in her car. I lowered down in my seat, afraid someone from the Body would see me with her. She lit a small joint and blew smoke out the window. It always seemed funny to see people smoking here. The air was so bad as it was—the valley was a bowl for other cities’ smog and pollution to fill, wiping away any trace of the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges that spread all around. The tagline for the valley was that we were the “Gateway to Yosemite” but I had no idea what that meant in any practical sense. If you cannot see mountains, are they even there? All I knew was that the haze sat heavy in the lungs.

  “My mom said you’re some kind of puritan or something,” she said.

  Florin said it like there was something to be ashamed of. Like she was so far above me. I wondered if she would have been converted too if she had seen Vern bring the rain, or if there was something about her that would have never been convinced. “We’re doing really important work,” I said. “We want to save all the sinners and live in paradise on earth with lots of rain to bring the crops.”

  “You know what a diviner is?” Florin said. “A water witch? A douser?”

  I shook my head no. “They take a Y-shaped rod and they find water underground. Farmers relied on them in old times.”

  “Is that why Daisy named the hotline Diviners?”

  “We come from generation after generation of water-finding women,” she said. “Women who could step on the soil and really feel its intention. You all are concerned about water coming from the sky, but there could be water under us right now, untapped.”

  I told her how we just wanted Peaches to be the raisin queen she once was, for things to go back to normal. Florin listened and nodded and then said she didn’t care, that the second she stepped foot into this place she knew she would leave it. She stubbed the joint out in the center console and I breathed the interesting smoke.

  “You’re probably pregnant,” she said, getting out of the car. “But you know that already.”

  I knew about pale blues. How one day I’d live in a bright, light house painted in those blues. Water would flow from our faucets clear and cool. The vines out my windows would be green and lush and of another place. I knew sharp and sudden that if given the choice I would never have stayed here in Peaches. I was only waiting. Deep down, waiting for the day my mother said we could leave.

  WHEN WE GOT back to the red house Florin and Daisy crouched next to me as I peed on the stick. They held my hands during the five minutes of wait and no one prayed. They rubbed my back as I threw up in the toilet when the stick said yes.

  Chapter 12

  Why did women have to suffer so? Why was the bringing forth of another human such painstaking work? I had only just found out about my condition but inside I was stripped bare and replaced. I was already someone who understood I was no longer myself but a vessel in service to another. I would never again know a breath that was only mine. There was sadness in that, a feeling of dread. Perhaps this feeling came with all pregnancies, no matter how planned and wonderful, just a symptom of astonishment, the transformation occurring. I never expected it would feel so dark, this blessing.

  I DRESSED FOR church, mother’s sundress, the breezy blue one she liked so well it was fraying at the neckline. She had found it at the Goodwill, pulled it from a pile like a treasure, called across the place to where I was elbows deep in a bin trying to find clothes for a naked doll, that the dress was linen! Linen, my mother explained on the drive home, was what rich people liked to wear on vacation. Liz Claiborne! she squealed. I supposed she got these ideas from magazines, from her life before I was born. Of course the dress was perfect on her, of course it was the color of her eyes.

  I wondered if she missed the dress, if she ever thought of coming to get it. The dress fit me nicely now, and I felt relieved that I would still look the same at a glance. Anyhow, most people never looked at anyone else with any clarity, one eye forever turned toward themselves. They wouldn’t care to notice my face had filled out a little, my breasts bigger and the small protrusion of my stomach. After all, I hadn’t noticed myself until I’d had reason to go looking. I pulled the linen tight against the paunch in the mirror. Now it curved outward and I couldn’t suck it back in flat.

  At school last year our class almost had someone come from Fresno to talk to us about sex, someone who was rumored to bring condoms and strangle bananas with them, but enough GOTS parents raised a fuss. Instead we had a twenty-five-year-old woman in a pressed white frock give a speech about abstinence. The way her cheeks reddened when she peered out at all of us and said she was a virgin. Cleared her throat. Said it again. Virgin. The GOTS parents lining the room like security broke into applause. It had made perfect sense to me then that since she was not married she would be a virgin. But now her words seemed unlikely. How could she have made it twenty-five years without someone taking it from her?

  My eyes burned with tears but none fell. Who was ins
ide me? It could be anyone, I thought. My mind swam with ways out. I was only a body containing another body. But no one had seen the body within me yet, no one knew, so did it have to exist? I was scared. I didn’t want to imagine it in there, becoming. My mother had said being pregnant was like an alien takeover. She hated it. The way I had stretched and rolled inside her. She said she imagined snakes fighting in there, and that sometimes all she could do was sleep to keep herself from thinking too hard about it. The fact that soon someone would need need need her. She said the thought of a baby repulsed her, all the crying in the night, all the foolish wanting.

  But was being needed a bad thing? My disease of loneliness wondered if a baby might be just the cure. For I could not yet fathom all this baby would mean or do to me, but one thing was now certain: I was no longer alone, and never would be again.

  I straightened my shoulders. I tilted my chin up. In the wake of my own mother leaving I had transformed into a mother myself, a bizarre trick. Would I be able to mother myself now? Would I no longer need her if I was her?

  AT CHURCH VERN wore a robe of pewter. There was a somberness about him, a heft in his usually perked shoulders. But his hair had been freshly curled, the ringlets cinched up closer to his collarbones than usual, and the spray holding them was flecked with glitter. The top of his head was freshly shaved, slick oiled skin and a tiny piece of toilet paper where he must have nicked himself, and he looked dewy as if he’d been freshly scrubbed. The boys’ club sat on the stage as if awaiting a ceremony and Vern asked the Bible study girls to come forward.

  Denay shot up first. She walked to the front and stood with her palms up before the boys. Slowly the rest of the girls came forward and then I followed too. We stood in a line and faced the boys’ club. They kept their gaze affixed to us, their expressions placid.

  “These are the tireless servants, commanded by God to bring forth amazing miracles. To unite us like never before. Cast out your doubt and let us pray over them.”

  The Body stretched their fingers toward us. I looked out over the sea of hands and at their faces. Most were eyes-closed, pleased as pigs. But a few stared up at us, brows cross, faces of worry. We were children, weren’t we? And what had children been told to do in such secret? I met Sharon’s gaze. She was deep eggplant under the eyes and a bruise wrapped around her neck. My hand fell to my stomach. She looked away and stared at her brother. His jaw clenched. To my side Denay smiled and hummed to herself, bounced on her toes.

  “Bless these young women and men of God. Allow them to show you our divine dedication, our willingness to submit to you, to raise up a true unfaltering army.”

  The boys’ club kept their hands pressed to their sides. How easy this was for them. How vital and strong they all looked there, untarnished, while us girls stood with our pale and plumping faces, sick and wrung out, weaponless. “Do not doubt them, church. Only doubt your own limitations of mind.”

  These boys, my body told me, were all dangerous.

  AFTER CHURCH VERN brought us up into his office. We crowded in the small space. Crosses no longer hung on the wall behind his desk, but instead a large sheet of butcher paper covered in incomprehensible scrawl had been sloppily taped up. The thick black marker seemed to make an outline of a quickly drawn-up plan in another language, and the sight of it made fear thicken in my stomach. I had always thought Vern to be organized, calculating, and thoughtful. Not in a rush. Not prone to bad handwriting. I narrowed my eyes at it and suddenly my name came into view, the names of a few of the other girls.

  The boys knelt close to him, the girls stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall. My skin itched and I scratched red lines down my arms.

  “My special children,” he said. “How blessed you are. But now I need to know just how blessed. Who here of the young ladies has not gotten their woman’s promise lately? Who among you is heavy with a quivering?”

  We girls were quiet for a time until Denay stepped forward. “I,” she said. She curtsied to Vern like she was about to commit a beautiful dance.

  “Of course.” He smiled at her. “Now who else?” I wanted to step forward like Denay, be so blindly happy like her, but something held me back. I would just listen now. I wouldn’t make a move.

  “Meekness is valued, ladies, I understand your hesitance. And that’s good, actually, because you won’t be telling anyone about this for a while. For now this is a secret between you and God and your pastor. Think of it as a precious flower pressed in the middle of your Bible, drying. You wouldn’t want to take it out too soon.”

  A secret. He’d had a secret with my mother, too.

  I caught his eye for a moment and detected something in his gaze that wasn’t quite there when I had first brought him my blood. I saw then we had all changed into something else and it felt like stepping off a ledge into open air, the moment frozen before the fall. I thought what I saw in him was passion, dedication. I wanted to see those things, of course. I wanted not to look at him then, and think he was crazed, but that word, crazed, came to me, swam up by instinct, and I pushed it down. Wait for something else, I thought. Wait for proof, as if my own body wasn’t proof enough.

  The girls nodded their heads yes. I tried to meet Sharon’s eye but she stared at her hands clasped white in front of her.

  “In the coming months your bodies will bloom forward and there will be a time of celebration. Be filled with gratitude, ladies. You’ve been Godshot.”

  AS WE FILED out of his office, Vern tapped my shoulder to stay behind. His eyes were red. Allergies again? I wondered. Or was he exhausted, staying up all night? He seemed thinner, his veins protruding down his neck, the tops of his hands.

  “Why so modest, Lacey May?” he said. He gathered papers in a stack on his desk and then spread them out again absentmindedly.

  “Just being obedient.”

  “I thought you wanted to be recognized for your faith.”

  I didn’t recall ever saying this to him aloud. It was something he must have seen in me. Perhaps something that was obvious to everyone and I’d never realized. I kept my eyes on my feet. I didn’t want him to read me, to know I’d visited the red house. I worried I wore it like a scent. I worried if he asked me anything directly, I would not be able to lie.

  “Why this way?” I said. “Why does God want us all pregnant?”

  He winced when I said pregnant, like the word was lewd. He probably would have preferred blessed. He flattened his lips. “I asked myself the same thing when He first showed me,” he said. “I thought, this is too complicated. This might even be impossible. But then I kept seeing it so clearly. You follow something like that, Lacey May. Something He shows you that clear. It’s not a suggestion. It’s an order.”

  “My mother wouldn’t want this for me,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Your mother.” Vern laughed. “Of course she wouldn’t. Oh, she had all kinds of ideas before her demise. All her own ideas.”

  I was pulled away from him then, though we were still in that cramped office, though I could still smell the sweat of him, the coffee breath. I was with my mother, trying to imagine what her ideas had even been. Why they hadn’t included me at all.

  “I don’t think they were her ideas. I think they were yours, and then they were the beers’ and then they were that man’s from the phone. I think she learned to ignore her own ideas a long time ago.”

  “That can be good for a woman,” he mused. “As long as you keep your eyes right here.” He pointed to himself.

  “Thank you,” I said, and the words nearly stuck in my throat. “May I go?”

  OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, Lyle kicked a soccer ball back and forth with Laramie. I intercepted the ball and drop-kicked it far into the field. Go fetch, I thought as Lyle motioned for Laramie to get it.

  “You could have spared me,” I said when Laramie was out of earshot. Lyle jogged closer to me.

  “It’s not yours, Lacey. Relax.”

  “What do you mean, not m
ine? It’s in my body,” I said.

  He leaned in so I could feel his breath on my ear. “Listen. It might not rain,” he said. “We’re all hoping it does, but a church like ours has to be prepared. Vern thinks if we ever need to leave it will be hard to keep the Body together. He wants us all united for if that day comes.”

  He spoke so serenely, with so much confidence, as if he’d memorized a script. He did not register at all how empty his words sounded in the face of what he was saying—that somehow the baby inside me was not really my own—I could tell. He pulled a Big Hunk candy bar from his back pocket. Opened it with his teeth and took a huge bite. He smacked and chewed the sticky nougat loudly, a fleck of peanut resting on his lip.

  “How could you have done this to me?” I said.

  He held his hand up like hold on while he finished chewing as if he were having a conversation about baseball.

  “Children unite the Body,” he said. “Children ensure another generation of soldiers. Parentless children who are tended to and cared for by everyone, who belong to the church itself, are the most useful gems.” He lifted the candy bar to take another bite and I smacked it out of his hand. It hit the dirt.

  He took a deep breath. Picked it up. “This is my last one of these, Lacey, and the Pac won’t be getting any more shipments.”

  I imagined someone else rocking my baby and then passing her on to someone else who would feed her, and then to someone else who would teach her the word and then to Vern to make her into a Bible study girl and all the while I would watch her and want to show her I was her one true mother but her eyes would meet mine and she would already be gone. She would not know me. I would not be able to bear such a loss. I wondered how my mother was able to, how she was able to breathe at all, without me. But perhaps she wasn’t, perhaps she was distraught with longing, and this made me feel even worse. It was easier to imagine her heartless.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m obeying what I’ve been told. What else can I do?”