Stony River (10 page)

A door off the alcove led to narrow stairs. Up she climbed, one hand beaming the flashlight, the other on the wall, feeling the way. A long, unfinished room with a half-moon window waited at the top of the stairs. The window wasn't boarded. Bands of light from it stained the wooden floor. Tereza knelt by the window, lifted her face to the stingy warmth of the autumn sun then looked down. From this perch Miranda could have eyeballed her and Linda on their way to smoke punks.

She looked for chains. Why Miranda hadn't escaped bamboozled her. Maybe Haggerty
had
worshiped the devil. It would be swell if she and Miranda could live here together someday, close to Ma but safe from Jimmy. They'd tear down the plywood and shutters, push the drapes aside and let sun, like melted butter, pour into every room.

2:00
PM
. Had Allen gotten to the movies?
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
was supposed to be on. He loved Abbott and Costello. After Tereza brought Allen back from the movies she'd usually hook up with Richie, Vlad, Vinnie and whoever else was at the White Castle, maybe play ball with them in the empty lot beside Vinnie's house. It was October now and ball was over. She tipped the flask back.

3:40
PM
. Downstairs again, carrying a blanket from Miranda's room for later. In a closet under the staircase, hard to see in the dim light, she found a gun nearly as tall as her, with a long, skinny nose and a polished wood butt padded in red rubber. She managed to heft its weight and rest the rubber pad against her shoulder. Pretending Jimmy was at the front door, she aimed and said, “Bang, bang, you're dead.”

6:10
PM
. Dark enough to risk stepping outside. She unblocked the back door, took the bucket from the sink and dashed to the Ma and Pa Kettle pump in the sharp cold air. The handle squeaked
when she lifted it. She pumped hard and fast until water gushed and splashed her feet. She lugged the full bucket inside, dipped a cup into it, took a drink and waited to croak or at least double over in agony. When she didn't, she filled every glass and cup in the house for later. She washed herself with the rest, toted the dirty water up to the bathroom and flushed away the reeking evidence of herself. Then back down the stairs to hurl the oozing potatoes toward the river and refill the bucket.

The booze had worn a hungry hole in her stomach. She opened the green beans and peas and set the cans on the coffee table in Dracula's room. Lit the candles on the tall holders with wooden matches from a tin box on the mantel. Spectacular! A movie set, with candles as spotlights. In the dim mirror of the picture window she watched herself eat, then cross the room in that dumbass outfit to check out the records beside the old phonograph. She cranked up the machine and put a record on the turntable. It wobbled slightly as a man sang “Yes, we have no bananas” like he was in a tunnel. She mugged it up for the spotlights, turning her hand into a megaphone and
wah-wahing
to the tune through her nose. She pretended Miranda was watching, laughing and saying, “You fracture me, Tez.”

Tereza sang and drank from the flask until the room did a dance, her insides swayed and her ears felt full of water. She sat down heavily on the couch and stared at the drunken flickers of candlelight until her head fell onto Buddy's jacket. She pulled Miranda's blanket over her and drew her legs up to her chest like the babies in jars at the State Fair last year. Embryos that didn't make it, Ma had said when Tereza got agitated, not poor little bastards nobody wanted.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
Tereza was dreaming about a TV wedding. When the preacher said “forsaking all others,” the realization that Ma had been forsaking her for Jimmy since she was four years old smacked her clear across the face. She woke to a throbbing head
and a mouth crusted with drool. Her whole body felt pissed off as she trudged to the kitchen. She couldn't stand this cold, dark prison any longer. If she had a boat, she'd row down the river all the way to the ocean and let herself get swallowed by a whale.

Leaning against the sink, chugging glass after glass of water with shaky hands, she spotted a door on the landing at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, hidden behind the coat and hat she'd thought was Crazy Haggerty. She pushed the coat aside and turned the knob.

Locked.

She got the crowbar. Linda wouldn't have approved but Linda wasn't there. So what if there was something behind the door that could kill her? She didn't exactly have great plans for the future.

She broke open the door, fired up the flashlight and started down another set of stairs, swiping at cobwebs. The air smelled like a wet mop. A mouse scurried in front of her and disappeared into shadows. The basement was long and narrow, one half filled with crap, the other set up for some kind of meeting. On the crap side, dried-up plants hung from a clothesline strung beside a boiler. The boiler looked like a dead bug with four pipe legs reaching up into nowhere. She'd check out the boxes of junk cluttering the floor later. The other half of the room was squawking for attention.

A harp, like the one on the flask, leaned against a black-draped table in front of the black curtain and white pillars she and Linda had seen. The black hooded robe still dangled from a hook. Pinned to the curtain was a hand-drawn picture that looked like the one-celled creature Mr. Boynton had shown them under a microscope. Weird objects sat on the table just so: a metal goblet wearing a necklace of acorns and seashells, a creepy animal horn, a tall white candle, a wooden stick, a long piece of knotted yarn, a black-handled knife and three jingle bells on a string. The stick, polished and tapered at the end, looked like a wand. Tereza picked it up, tapped the air and said “Bibbidy bobbidi boo,” but she was still there, still pond-scum ugly.
She lifted the knife and blew the dust off it. Its double-edged blade was six or seven inches long, but it would fit in her pocketbook.

Ma claimed Tereza had ESP because she always knew when it was safe to come home. What if Miranda and Tereza were tuned to the same frequency? It would explain why Miranda had looked across to where Linda and Tereza were hiding the day the cops took her away and why Tereza had known she'd hole up in this house one day. The voice calling her yesterday could've been Miranda's, the objects on the table a coded message.

Tereza had to break into the desk now. Miranda would want her to.

FIVE

OCTOBER 30, 1955
. In a chapel cool and dim with rafters high and dark, Miranda prays: “I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and to all the saints …”

Mass is over but she remains, knees pressing into the unforgiving bench she can feel even through her mother's rose-patterned dress. Lingering as well is smoke from burning incense—“the petitions of the faithful drifting up to Heaven,” Father Shandley calls it. The pungently sweet smell tugs at her: a longing for James and the sacred ground of their altar, their place apart from the World and protected.

“… that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

The musicality, not the meaning, of the words renders the Confiteor Miranda's favorite prayer. She recites it first in English, and then, not sure she's pronouncing it correctly, in the Latin she memorized from the short, squat missal Doris gave her when she was baptized. Once she's able to attend high school, like the inmates who get to wear uniforms, she means to study Latin properly. Miranda has spent half of the four months she's been at St. Bernadette's in religious instruction. The nuns are amazed at how much she's absorbed. She finds it easy to grasp and strangely familiar: the saints in heaven have the same great power as the gods and goddesses to intercede
for mortals. At
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
she strikes her chest with her fist three times, a gesture of sorrow for sin. The words and the gesture reach far down to the faceless place where the Voice of James lives curled up inside her. It tells her she has no need for sorrow, that the concept of sin is a fallacy. Some days she believes the Voice; other days, the nuns and Father Shandley.

Worshipers file out in the aisles on either side—the girls, like her, with mandatory white lace doilies on their head; the nuns all in black, swooping like the war goddess Morrígan in her scald-crow-of-battle guise. And those from the hunched-together houses and tenements surrounding St. Bernadette's Orphan Asylum and Convent: bowed old women in long, dark dresses whose bones crack as they kneel; parents who supply the chapel with altar boys; rough-looking men rumored to sleep on the ground outside the gates.

The girls will proceed to the dining room on the same floor as the chapel. They'll pass the laundry where Miranda works two hours each day after school, ironing sheets the nuns take in from hospitals and nursing homes.

“Do they pay you?” Doris asked. “You should insist they pay you.”

They don't.

It's fair play for the food Miranda eats and has not to prepare. She doesn't tell Doris that the nuns dole out additional hours in the laundry as punishment. She's partial to the smell of hot iron on bleached sheets and enjoys the power she has to make wrinkles disappear. She likes ironing better than building wood fires or laundering nappies.

Miranda will join the lunch queue once she finishes her prayers. It doesn't bother her to be last. She doesn't care with whom she sits. Others will push their way into the room, tripping over each other to secure their favorite places at the long wooden tables and benches. Sisters Elaine and Monica, the prickly-voiced twin goddesses of the dining room, will threaten to banish them,
right this minute
, if they
don't slow down. Miranda will think about nothing except holding Cian after lunch, kissing his soft cheek, hoping this time he won't cry when he sees her.

He eats in the nursery with the children who aren't yet schoolaged. He's gained six pounds since they arrived. If not adopted by age five, boys are sent to a different orphanage; girls move to the dormitory. Miranda means to be free of St. Bernadette's before Cian is five and return with him to their house until his calling is clear. He will cling to her, not Sister Joseph, when he's sleepy or hungry. She, not Sister Cameron, will be first to hear his latest word.

She'll collect him today before Doris arrives, as she does every second Sunday after the midday meal. Sometimes it seems as if Doris exists for Miranda alone. It's surprising when she materializes suddenly, like a rainbow, where others can see her, too.

Miranda squeezes her eyes shut to concentrate. Distraction from prayer is a sin.

“Therefore, I beseech blessed Mary ever Virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, to pray to the Lord our God for me.” The repetition and the symmetry reassure Miranda that order exists outside her often chaotic mind. Whenever prayer leads her into a dreamlike state, the Voice whispers encouragement.
The words matter less than the surrendering
, it says;
ritual's purpose is to distract the conscious mind and let the subconscious take over
. Whatever sadness Miranda's conscious mind may be feeling when she enters the chapel recedes with the magical chill of holy water from the font, the ritual crossing of herself and the hush that allows James's voice to come through and make each next day possible.

To the right of the sanctuary is a stone angel robed in a cloud, wings spread, poised for flight. It brings to mind James's tales of invisible beings, some winged, some not, some benevolent, some not. Pure energy they are, James told her, shaped from beliefs and
memories. He often encountered them on his journeys between this world and
an saol eile,
the Other Life, where everything is more intense and nothing is hidden. She says six Our Fathers, six Hail Marys and six Glory Be to the Fathers in case James is stuck between this world and
an saol eile
—the place the catechism calls Purgatory.