The Patron Saint of Liars (41 page)

"Come sit here with me," Sister Evangeline said, patting a place on the bed beside her.

"No," I said.

"Cecilia," she said. She had a way of saying my name when she was trying to coax me into something. She said every syllable as a separate word. She almost hummed it. Sa-ceel-lee-a.

"I'm going to go now," I said.

"No," she said. "Come here."

I went and sat down on the edge of the bed, the very edge. She reached over and took my hand and squeezed it, but I wouldn't squeeze back.

"I'm not being a very good nun today," she said. "Other days, I'd tell you how God works, how we don't always understand His ways, but that they are always for the best. I know it's true, but today, it isn't in my heart and it shames me." She held my hand tighter. It hurt a little. "Today I'm a selfish old woman and I'm as sad as I've ever been because I want things that I can't have. This isn't what I want, and so I hate it. There's not a thing in the world I can do to get Rose to help me because she's already gone, but you're here, pet, and I'll tell you, you're going to have to help me. I know you're torn apart, but I can't have you go away from me too, especially not now, because I just couldn't stand that." She took my chin in her other hand and turned my face to hers. "This is what you're going to have to do: you're going to have to be the one to remind me how God works, how He gives us what we need. You're going to have to be that thing for me and I'm going to be it for you. I can't miss Rose and miss you too. It's too much. It's too much for anybody."

I felt like crying, but I was so tired and so hurt that I knew if I started I wouldn't be able to stop. So I put my legs up on the bed and put my head in her lap and Sister Evangeline ran her fingers through my hair while she looked out the window. "What is today?" she said.

"July third."

"Then God has told us something after all," she said. "This is the feast day of Saint Thomas, doubting Thomas. He didn't go with the other apostles to see the empty tomb of the Lord, and when they told him, he didn't believe. He said, 'Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger in the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.' So when Christ came back, and they were all alone, He said to Thomas, 'Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand and put it into my side. And be not faithless, but believing.' And Thomas fell to his feet and cried, 'My Lord and my God.' But you know what Jesus said to him, pet? Jesus said, 'Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen, and have believed.'"

Later that night, after someone had made dinner and someone had cleaned it up and put the plates away, I went to my mother's house. I don't know what I expected, exactly. I thought something would be different, but it was all the same. I hadn't been to my mother's house very often, and I was never there alone, unless she sent me over from the kitchen to pick up a recipe book she had left on her nightstand. Of course, I knew it all from living there when I was young, and she hadn't made any changes since my father and I had moved across the pasture five years ago. I remembered it as being a wonderful place when I was growing up. I loved the smallness, the way the kitchen and living room were just one big room together. The way you could sit on the couch and see everything. It was exactly the opposite of Saint Elizabeth's, which had a hundred places to be lost in. The little house made us close, if only because we were always right next to each other.

But now I saw it as my mother would have, coming home alone night after night. It was just a place she slept. A place she brushed her teeth and read her books and waited for time to pass. My mother didn't have a television or a radio. She kept a phone in, in case Sister Evangeline needed something in the night, but I doubt she ever called anyone. I don't remember her ever calling us, or that I called her. All those years, but she hadn't done anything to make it her own place, no framed pictures or little, stupid things that people kept on tables beside couches. It could have been a cabin that people rented over the summer, it could have been anyplace. It didn't bear her marks, and now that she was gone it was like she'd never been there at all.

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. There was a jar of instant coffee, a jar of sugar, a box of saltines, peanut butter. There wasn't a full set of anything: two glasses, one cup, four spoons. In the drawer next to the stove I found an open box of Marlboros. I never knew my mother smoked. How could I not know that? I took one out of the pack, turned the front burner of the gas range on high, and lit it. I had smoked once or twice before, after school, at a slumber party. I never liked it. But this one I drew in and held until it made me cough, and even then I kept on smoking it.

I took the cigarette into her bedroom and turned on a light. The bed was made, everything was put away. I lifted up the bedspread and looked underneath the bed. There wasn't a slipper, an earring, a Kleenex. There wasn't even dust. It made me wonder if she'd ever been there at all. I sat down on the bed and smoked, flicking the ashes onto the cupped rim around the base of the lamp. I should have gone and gotten a saucer, but it didn't feel that important. I set the cigarette down and went to look in her closet, her drawers, and was so relieved to see her clothes there that I nearly said something aloud. I was the private investigator and this was my proof. She had left behind everything she didn't think she'd need. I took dresses off the hangers and held them to my face. I could smell her in the clothes, even though I'd never really thought about my mother smelling like anything before. She didn't wear perfume or lipstick, but she was there just the same, sweet and floury, a little bit of laundry detergent. I pulled out a dress I knew, one that was cotton with a pattern of green leaves so small that from a distance it didn't even look like a pattern. She'd made it herself. She'd made almost everything here as a way of passing the time when she came home. The dress would have been too big for me. My mother was so much taller than I was. But I set it aside anyway. I took sweaters and a beige slip. I took a pair of stockings. There wasn't much there, and after ten minutes of trying to make choices I put it all out on the bed. I would take all of it. Even then it would fit into one shopping bag.

In the bedside table I found a blue ballpoint pen, a stack of unused postcards with generic sunset pictures, a roll of stamps. I added these to my pile. I thought for a minute about putting it all back, leaving this house exactly as she had left it so I could come back for the rest of my life and touch her things and smell them where they were. I decided that was sick. I wanted them with me. I wanted to shorten the dresses and wear the sweaters too big. I wanted to wear everything until they turned into things that were mine. I found a bag in the kitchen, folded all of it up, and put it inside.

I didn't find anything with writing on it. Not even in the trash cans, which I went through carefully. My mother checked her books out of the little library in Habit and returned them all promptly, so there wasn't a book to see if she'd underlined anything or written, How true! in the margin beside her favorite passages the way the sentimental girls in my high school did.

I went into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet. There was even less there. A bottle of aspirin, an unopened tube of toothpaste, a jar of hand cream. I took these, too.

I'll say this much, she took the things I gave her, or she was careful to throw them all away awhile ago or take them out in the woods somewhere and bury them. The tin charm bracelet I bought her for Christmas when I was nine, the giant blue mixing bowl, the cashmere scarf I'd saved for, all of those things were gone. I was grateful. I think it would have killed me to find them.

I couldn't help but think there would be something for me, even if there wasn't something from me. There would be a note hidden carefully in a place where only I would find it. She wanted it that way, so she wouldn't hurt anyone else's feelings. Or maybe it wouldn't even be a note. Maybe there would just be some sort of cryptic message that I would have to put together. It would tell me where she was or why she'd gone, but even though I went over the place, slid my hands between sofa cushions, looked beneath the ice cube tray in the freezer, I found nothing.

I was in the hall closet, trying to see in a shelf above my head, when I heard the door open. I spun around so quick I nearly lost my balance and saw my father there, both of us surprised to be caught, both of us disappointed because we thought it was someone else who was surprising us.

"I saw the light on," he said. "I thought I should come over and check—"

"I'm just going through some stuff," I said.

He came in and sat down on the couch. I didn't know what was happening between us, why grief had made us so awkward all of the sudden, but I couldn't bring myself to ask. "Did you find anything?" he said.

"Nothing, really. Some clothes, some bathroom stuff. I'm going to keep the clothes, if you think that would be all right."

He turned to me. "Of course," he said. "All of this is yours. You don't need to ask for anything."

"It feels strange," I said. "Like I'm stealing things."

"You're not," he said. "Don't be silly."

And then we were just quiet for a while, looking around. "I lived in this house for more than thirty years," my father said finally. "And now I feel like I've never been here before. It's the damnedest thing."

"Come on," I said, picking up the bag. "Let's go home."

We were careful to turn out all the lights so that if we were to see them on, later, we would know something had happened.

But nothing happened. Lorraine took over in the kitchen. Sister Bernadette gave it a shot, Sister Loyola, even Mother Corinne went in a time or two to try and make a sauce, but the girls seemed to do a better job. My mother had left files of menus, recipe books tagged with white slips of paper. Sister Evangeline kept her place in the kitchen and as it turned out, she'd been watching all those years. She could direct the girls fairly well, telling them what to do next. At ninety she had reclaimed her kitchen.

I went there to see her and to see Lorraine, but I wouldn't have anything to do with the food. It would've been too easy, me stepping into the spot my mother had left. Too easy for Mother Corinne, who had never given her the time of day to begin with. The kitchen was not going to be my fate in life, and I knew this was a place that could swallow you whole and never let you out. So when I could stand to be there at all, I only watched, kept people company, and sat on my hands.

Three days after my mother left, Lorraine came to my house early in the morning. She just came right in and woke me up, took hold of my foot and shook it until my eyes slit open.

"Get up," she said.

I sat up slowly and tried to swallow the taste in my mouth. "What?"

"Hair dye," Lorraine said, and held up a brown paper bag. "I'm going to dye your hair."

"The hell you are," I said, half awake.

"No," she said, "I am." She pulled the sheet back and dragged me out of bed, down the hall to the bathroom.

"Stop this," I said. "I'm not up yet."

"I know." Lorraine put the toilet seat down and had me sit on top of the lid. She wrapped a towel around my neck. "If I waited until you were up you wouldn't do it. Think of this as a surprise party for your hair." She ripped open the package and started to mix the contents of two small bottles together. "I already read the directions," she said. "It's highlights. Paint-on. If you like it we'll go to a full color job. I've been thinking about this, ever since that day we were at the river. You said your hair was dishwater, that was your word." She grabbed a section of my hair and began to dab on some god-awful-smelling stuff with a brush that looked like it had come from a bottle of Liquid Paper. "Before you said that, it didn't look so bad to me, but since then—" She made bold streaks down in front of my face, and I just sat there, dazed. I don't know why I let her do it. "Well, I can see it now. It's a little flat. You can get a lot of depth through color."

Lorraine painted away. She was careful. She was trying to do a good job. "You need to do something different every now and then," she said, sounding like a busy hairdresser handing out pat advice. "This is really going to be you."

"You're just trying to make me feel better." I appreciated the fact that she wasn't talking about my mother. The truth was, Lorraine loved my mother, and in a funny way I imagine she missed her almost as much as I did.

"Of course I'm trying to make you feel better, idiot," Lorraine said. "Believe me, you'll have plenty of time to make me feel better later on."

"Scheduling in a depression?" I asked.

Lorraine, in her favorite gesture, stepped back and opened her arms to reveal her round stomach to the world. "I imagine I'll be getting less and less cheerful about this as time goes on," she said.

I stopped and looked at her. She looked like a painting, some eighteenth-century Italian Madonna. The light fixture over the sink put a pale glow around her head. "Are you worried?" I said.

"You bet," Lorraine said, and turned her attention back to my highlights. "You bet."

The color was me. After she timed the dye and held my head under the faucet for a rinse, she blew it dry. I could see what she'd been talking about. The color had been flat before. It was better now. Lorraine was so proud of herself. "I like it," I said, looking at the two of us in the mirror. I was sort of a blonde again. A streaky blonde.

"I knew you would. You never let anybody do anything for you," she said. "I have to trick you if I want to do something nice."

Lorraine insisted that I go back to Saint Elizabeth's with her so people could admire her handiwork. Besides, it was getting to be time to start lunch. Lorraine seemed to bloom under the weight of her new responsibility in the kitchen. She made up a careful list of all the special diets girls were on. No sugar for Mary Carol, who had developed gestational diabetes. No salt for Paula, whose blood pressure ran high. "I'm not a good cook," she said. "Not like Rose, but I'm not bad. Anyone who can read can cook all right if they pay attention, but I think if I stick with it I might really be okay at this."