After the Fog (30 page)

A cat sprung onto Rose’s back. She threw her shoulders back, biting her lip to keep from screaming and scaring Joey. The hairball would not let go. It dug his claws in and her skin stung. She flailed her arms, spinning around the room until she stumbled backward, landing on Joey’s bed, the cat finally releasing Rose.

Rose sprang up and spun around, hands covering her mouth, not breathing, mortified that she’d just flung herself onto the bed of a pained, sick child.

But when she finally focused she saw Joey had pushed to sitting and was petting the cat, mewing at it as it mewed back. His breath was still labored, his complexion grey, but his demeanor, calm.

If this was any other person, she would have ripped the mangy cat from the patient’s grip. But she let Joey nuzzle it, the purring turning her stomach, but lighting Joey’s face like Christmas at the Carnegie’s.

He explained that the cat wasn’t his. “But he likes me. And my mum. He sits on her all day long.”

Rose nodded. She knew who owned the cat, the man who slept under the Saltz’s porch, behind the loose lattice. No one seemed to know he was there. Mr. Saltz would have charged him a boarder’s fee no doubt. No, like Rose apparently not knowing what her husband was up to, the Saltz’s did not know who lurked under their very house.

“I can’t breathe, Nurse Pavlesic.”

Rose jumped at the sound of Joey’s voice. She cocked her head and watched him breathe. She pushed him gently backward onto the pillows, reaching around the feline.

The cat hissed as Rose pulled one of Joey’s hands free. “Let’s take a look, right here.” Joey’s forefinger scratched at the cat’s neck, appearing and disappearing below the fur.

He released the cat and it leapt away.

Rose turned Joey’s wrist over to take his pulse.

“Nurse?” Joey said through his sandpapery voice.

“Just breathe, Joey, just breathe.”

Rose studied his wrist and began recounting his pulse.

“I watch out that there window. I see little Leo hopping about, heading to work with you, playing jacks and hopscotch and tag…”

Rose nodded and tried to focus on his pulse.

“You think I’ll hop and run and play tag again some day, Nurse?” Joey’s eyes watered with his strained words.

“Yes, you will.” Rose’s voice cracked. She wondered how she could tell this boy such a lie. It wasn’t in her nature to sugarcoat anything. “Anything’s possible, Joey. You just need to believe. And breathe. Just breathe.”

He turned toward the window and gazed out, as though he could see beyond the fog that shrouded his normal view of their street. Rose counted his pulse yet again. After a few tries she focused and finally completed the task.

“You lost count a-gainnnnn,” Joey said.

“What?”

“You lose count every time you take my pulse. You start over every time at least twice.”

“Well with you chattering like you do…working around that damn
cat
, kiddo that’s no surprise. Now stuff it in your sock.”

“Aren’t you going to trace it?”

“What?”

“My wrist. You always rub my wrist with your thumb before you lay your fingers there. I love that. It tickles.”

Rose stared at Joey’s wrist. She realized right then that she’d spent her entire nursing lifetime looking at people’s wrists, studying the way blue veins and red capillaries sprawled across one person’s and shot down another’s, the way coloring might be darker or lighter in some spots, looking for her daughter, hoping someday that Florida-shaped marking would somehow appear on someone’s wrist, revealing the little girl she’d given away.

“I didn’t realize I did that,” Rose said.

She finally focused long enough to get an accurate count.

“It’s okay,” Joey said.

“Hmm?”

“You losing count. I like that touch. Yer sort of mean n’at, always yelling at this person and that, but underneath it all you’re a kind person. I can feel it in yer fingers when you’re not yanking my limbs all to whatnot. Tell me again ‘bout Sister Kenny who devised this torture. Please, your story makes me laugh.”

Rose smiled then once out of Joey’s sightline the grin fell away. She put her hands under his head, pulling his neck straight. The pain she planned to inflict would help him maintain a minimal level of health, but Rose believed it was worth it.

She took a deep breath, letting the exhaled air wash away her emotions, so she would be able to do her job, inflicting pain, and then come back and do it again. She couldn’t let sympathy mix in her heart, let herself feel what he did. That wouldn’t help Joey. She needed to be a nurse first.

She removed his sock and a rancid odor of filth smacked her. It blended with her queasy stomach and she swallowed her nausea. She grabbed the sole of his foot with one hand and pushed down on his quad with the other, bringing forth the first scream she’d ever heard Joey let out. She thought, she’d have to report his decline in health and wondered if he would have to be hospitalized; no medical facility in their right mind would attempt to place an iron lung in a rat-trap like the Saltz’s.

Rose finished Joey’s exercises, washed him down, dressed him in the cleanest pajamas she could find before giving him a nip of bourbon for the pain she’d caused and then pulled Mrs. Tucharoni’s clean sheet from her bag and tucked it around Joey’s body. Rose left the Saltz’s crooked home to a chorus of screams and thuds of furniture and other items hitting the walls.

She felt an urge to go to Henry and not only thank him for the wonderful life he’d given her, but also to confess to him about her first baby, about her virginity that didn’t exist when they married. But then, really, her current state of mind was best soothed by her work and a proper Church confession.

L
ike a stopped up bowel system, the typical five minute jaunt to the church—was now stops and starts, people straining through sidewalks, pushing into bustling housewives and hurried businessmen, jostling others so often that people quit apologizing and chattering about the binding fog. They simply kept going toward their destination. This fog was not normal. Nothing was. But Rose kept making her way through the thick fog. She’d never seen it this oppressive, so debilitating. It was definitely all wrong, and Rose would meet with Bonaroti about it. This time she would listen. There must be something more she could do.

Rose reached the church, her chest tight from the stinging air. Even she, someone in perfect health, was feeling the effects of the gritty smog. She ran her tongue around her mouth and spit into the grass beside the steps. It was too dark for Rose to see if her mucus was black or clear. Just the fact she had to spit told her everything she needed to know. Maybe that day was the one that brought all her sins down around her head. Maybe God had finally decided to punish her. And he was so repulsed by her he’d punish the entire town.

Inside the church, Rose dipped her hand in the holy water font, crossed herself and noticed Father Tom sitting in the pew across from it. She hoped that meant Father Slavin was in the confessional. She headed down the aisle and saw the confessional was free.

Father Tom sat with one foot over his knee, toying with his shoelace. “So, what brings you here a mere twenty-four hours after your last confession and twelve or whatever it was since that one?”

“It’s actually twenty-six hours.” Rose straightened and gripped her bag handles tight, her nails digging into her palms. “
Normally
, when the confessional is empty I’d find Father Slavin in the sanctuary, dusting, polishing silver, refilling the candles,
dusting
.”

Father Tom narrowed his eyes at Rose and raised his shoulders. He didn’t snap back as she expected, and for a moment she stopped judging, long enough to look into the man’s eyes.

“Well,” Father Tom said, “I dunno much about what the general public thinks of me, but I do remember Father Slavin telling parishioners he introduced me to that I was wise. He actually used that word. As if he knew I’d need that sort of positioning when
you
came in.” He clasped his hands together and pointed his forefingers at Rose as though they were a barrel of a gun. “So, have at it.”

“Here?”

“God can hear us just the same right here.”

Rose looked around at the empty church, and felt off-kilter. She thought she should tear out of church and offer her sins directly to God instead of through the priest. But something in Father Tom’s kind face softened her, made her shuffle into the pew behind him.

She covered her eyes and rested her elbow on the back of the pew in front of her.

She started in a strained whisper. “Bless me oh Lord for I have sinned. It’s been roughly twenty-six hours since my last confession. One, I drank like a steel man on payday last night. I came dangerously close to flirting. Well, I did flirt, and I liked it. Four through 100, I swore using various and sundry words including the Lord’s name in vain. Atrocious thoughts for various people in my life along with my wishing certain ones might drop dead found their way into my head. Just popped in there like the devil himself.”

Father Tom leaned back turning his ear directly toward Rose as though he might have missed a few words.

Rose was picking up speed. “I have deep frustration toward my husband. The frustration is
tinged
at the very least with pure hatred. He’s one of the smartest men I know. But, not smart in practical ways and that gets in the way of real life. He’s all up in his head,” Rose wheeled her hand in a circle at the wrist, “And he’s keeping secrets. That’s where the hate lives. The other ‘I’m too busy thinking bullshit,’ just pisses me off. He’s commiserating with people who cause me so much trouble and that’s what makes me want to vomit. And then there’s my daughter Magdalena.”

Rose stopped talking and she realized all the other stuff she blurted out was just a dam holding back her real dismay. She peeked at the priest through her fingers. She didn’t know why, but she trusted the man. Maybe because he would soon be gone when Slavin returned. She could unburden herself to someone who would never sit at her dinner table.

“Magdalena’s pregnant. She’s seventeen and pregnant. And I hate her for it. How could she do that?” Rose ground her teeth so hard they hurt.

Father Tom’s face conveyed confused interest, like a scientist tackling a theoretical quandary.

Rose tightened her whisper. “I taught her and taught her and taught her. And she had the nerve to say all she wanted was to be held or loved or some shit as though her father and I hadn’t done just that. I grew up in an orphanage. I know what ‘needs to be held’ means and that daughter of mine does not know what she was talking about. And, she didn’t listen. She went about her life without a thought for me. I mean, doesn’t she know the weight of her sins? That now
I
have to bear some of the sin? My soul already has a reservation at the inn in hell and I’m full up to my chin with my own misdeeds…Slut.”

“You didn’t call her that, did you?”

Rose shook her head slowly. “But I said the word. She thinks I did.”

“Are you confessing or discussing, Rose?” Father Tom cut her off.

Rose dropped her hand from her eyes and met Father Tom’s gaze.

“I want to offer my thoughts on your crises,” he said, and exhaled. “But yesterday you said you didn’t need that, only a penance and I don’t want to throw out penance willy-nilly, so I’d like you to clarify what exactly you are confessing. Or discussing. I’m fine with that, too.”

Rose bit her lip and ran her fingers into the pew’s carvings that snaked and circled and ran down its back.

Rose was about to tell him where to shove it when it came to her.
This
was what Henry had been talking about. The thought hit her hard. She did hoard her pain. She did not share who she was. And she wanted to discuss this with Father Tom. For the first time in her life, she didn’t move right over whatever problem there was in front of her—how could she possibly fix all that had gone wrong by saying a few Hail Marys? Maybe she could let it all out, finally. For the first time, she wanted to release all her sins and still have someone to tell her she wasn’t going to rot in hell.

Sister John Ann was the one who had brought Rose so fully back to the church. In deed anyway. The woman had helped her through Bennett’s leaving, and nursing school, convincing Rose that some of her failing was due to her lackadaisical spiritual life. If Rose just went back to the church, really committed to its structure and beliefs, she would live a much happier, richer, safer life. And she had. She had done everything Sister John Ann had asked, for nearly twenty years.

Father Tom tapped Rose’s hand.

She straightened at Father Tom’s recognition of her still sitting there, struck mute. “Oh. Yes. Yes. Um. Go on. Please.”

“Six Rosaries.”

“Six Rosaries?” What happened to the discussion? She thought he would take the lead. What happened to the warmth she’d just felt emanating from him, telling her she could trust him? Why couldn’t he sense what she wanted?

“Six,” he said.

Rose squeezed her eyes shut and gripped her bag. She wanted to scream. She needed to know the world isn’t falling into a black hole, that Donora wasn’t being swallowed up by fog, that her family wasn’t slipping into the banks of hell.
Please.