Five Minutes in Heaven (13 page)

But Molly never even congratulated her on her student council victory. And if Jude tried to explain some of the ideas she was learning about in the seminar, Molly would just shrug and say, “Afraid you've lost me again, brainchild.”

Some afternoons after school now, instead of racing Flame through the Wildwoods, Jude sat with Sandy in his upstairs bedroom discussing the big bang theory and natural selection and relativity. Out the window, they watched Noreen coaching Molly in Noreen's backyard for the upcoming cheerleader try outs. Sometimes their lyrics reached Jude and Sandy through the open windows:

“Well, down my leg and up my spine!

We've got a team that's mighty fine!”

She and Sandy would pause in their discussion of Hegel's dialectic to giggle. Then Jude would frown at herself, feeling disloyal.

As they strolled home from Charm Class through the twilight, allowing their kilted hips to sway with every step, Jude said, “My dad said he'd teach us to drive the jeep down that hill behind the cemetery on Saturday afternoon.”

“Oh, Jude, I'm afraid I can't.”

“But it would be really neat to be able to drive, wouldn't it?”

“I'm afraid I'm tied up on Saturday afternoon.”

“Doing what?”

“Jude, I'm not your slave. You don't need to know my every move.”

“Sorry.”

They walked in silence past yards full of tulips. Ever since Jude had realized that her experience on the raft with Molly had been just a dream, she hadn't known how to behave with her. It seemed impossible to recapture the unselfconscious accord of their childhood, but no guidelines for their distressing new separateness had emerged. So they often experienced awkward silences or irritated outbursts, followed by frantic attempts to backpedal to the harmony they used to take so effortlessly for granted.

“I like the white tulips best, don't you?” Molly finally said.

“Me, too,” said Jude, accepting the apology.

“Actually, I'm going to the lake with Ace Saturday afternoon. To ride in his father's motorboat.” She was trying to sound casual.

Jude glanced at her. Molly and Ace often danced together at the noontime sock hops. And although Molly never admitted it, Jude suspected that they talked on the phone a lot at night. Occasionally, the three of them sat together on the bleachers at lunch to watch intramural basketball. Ace and Molly weren't going steady, and they never went out on dates, but Jude could tell that Molly was sometimes preoccupied with him.

“But why Ace?” she finally asked, genuinely curious. “I just don't get it. Have you forgotten how mean he was to us?”

“There's a really sweet side to him that you've never seen, Jude. He may act tough, but inside he's just a sad, scared little boy.” She was smiling fondly, as though describing the antics of her dog.

“Please spare me the details.”

“Besides, there are reasons why he was so mean.”

“Such as?”

“His father isn't a nice man.”

“His father is the best lawyer in town. My dad says he was a big hero in the war.”

“I can't say any more.”

Jude studied her from the corner of her eye. “We've never had secrets, Molly.” They were passing more tulips. Jude decided she hated them, especially the white ones.

“I promised Ace.”

“So Ace is more important to you now than I am?”

“No, of course not, Jude. But he needs me. I think I can help him.”

Reaching the crack in the sidewalk marking the boundary between their yards, they turned to face each other. Molly's shirt collar was peeping out from beneath her sweater. On it, Jude spotted a tiny dagger made from a straight pin, a piece of red plastic cord, and some multicolored beads the size of BBs. Noreen had started this fad, which had swept the halls of the junior high school. She and the other cheerleaders made sets consisting of a miniature dagger and sword. The boys bought them, and the cheerleaders donated the money to muscular dystrophy. The boys wore them crossed on their collars until they wanted to go steady, at which point they gave their girlfriends their daggers.

“What's that?” asked Jude, pointing at Molly's dagger as though at a scorpion.

Molly started, then looked quickly away. “Ace asked me to wear it today.”

Jude said nothing for a long time. She was losing this battle, but she was damned if she'd make it easy for either of them. “What about me?

“But Jude, you're a girl,” said Molly gently. “You're my best friend, but Ace is my boyfriend. Why don't you get a boyfriend, too? Then we can double-date to the movies. What about Jerry Crawford? Ace says he really likes you.”

“What about our cabin?” Jude asked doggedly. She didn't want Jerry Crawford. She wanted Molly.

“What cabin?”

“The cabin we were going to build on the ridge above the cave. With the paddock for Flame and Pal.”

“But we were just kids then, Jude. It was like playing house.” She was gazing at Jude with loving concern.

Jude felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, like a trapdoor to hell. She had known she was losing, but she hadn't realized that she'd already lost.

“Please don't do this, Molly.”

Molly laughed weakly. “But I'm not doing anything.”

As Jude walked up her sidewalk, she reflected that if she had one of those weird things growing between her legs, like Molly's father or the boys behind the furnace, she'd be able to slow-dance with Molly and go steady with her and all the things she had started wanting since entering junior high. Jude had no choice but to build their cabin alone, without Molly, who would be living somewhere else with Ace Kilgore and their mutant babies.

Aunt Audrey was upstairs talking to her new baby, Daniel junior, who was cooing and gurgling. Jude went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of Mrs. Starnes's latest cake—chocolate fudge with buttercream frosting. Carrying her plate into the living room, she sat down in the brown leather chair whose arms she and Molly used to ride, lassoing Sidney with Clementine's clothesline. Reaching over to the end table, she opened the drawer and extracted the framed photo of her mother in the wine bottle, setting it up on the table. Her father always put it in the drawer now, explaining that it upset Aunt Audrey. And Jude always removed it, not explaining that it upset
her
to have Aunt Audrey sleeping in the very bed in which her father gave her mother the baby that had killed her.

Yet the birth of Aunt Audrey's two babies hadn't killed
her,
so Jude was having to reexamine her assumptions. And she had to confess that she adored her little half brothers, with their toothless grins and tiny twitching digits and intense navy-blue gazes. Munching her cake, she stared at the photo of her beautiful mother, trapped in a bottle like an exotic flower. She wondered whether her mother had felt the same fierce devotion for her that Aunt Audrey seemed to feel for her babies. She thought probably so, judging by the look on her face as she held Jude's cheek to her own in the photo by Jude's bedside.

I
N A TENT LIKE
the circus big top, pitched in the middle of the county fairground on the outskirts of town, a visiting evangelist with a vanilla pompadour and a smile that wouldn't quit was enjoining the Baptist Youth from throughout the area to swear forever to forgo dancing, drinking, card playing, swearing, and the “illicit pleasures of the flesh.” Jude watched from her folding chair beside Jerry Crawford as Molly and Ace joined the throng moving down the center aisle toward the front platform to be born again. She was appalled by the ease with which Molly was making a vow she'd never keep, loving Over the Moon as she did. Ace was evidently turning her into a liar. She'd been behaving very oddly since becoming pinned to him. Her blue eyes had lost their luster, and she walked like a robot, as though hypnotized by an evil wizard.

The new recruits for salvation gathered behind the glad-handing preacher, facing the audience. Meeting Molly's eyes, Jude gestured in wolfspeak, What the hell are you doing?

Molly looked away, smiling proudly up at Ace. The perpetually grinning agent of the Lord extended his arms as though walking a tightrope and invoked the Lord's blessing on “these the future leaders of our great Chrush-chen nation,” who had pledged henceforth to lead new lives “swept clean by the push broom of Christ!”

Afterward, the Baptist Youth from Jude's church piled into their hay-filled delivery truck. As it rumbled down the road toward town, someone began singing “Jacob's Ladder.”

Jerry leaned down, searching for Jude's lips in the dark. His Dentyne-fresh breath was warm on her cheek. Jude turned her head aside and feigned a deep commitment to getting the alto harmony just right on “If you love Him, why not serve Him?” Jerry sighed and rummaged through the hay for her hand, which he pinned beneath his own like copulating starfish.

In the middle of “This Little Light of Mine,” everyone began waving flashlights around the truck. In the sweeping beams, Jude spotted Ace and Molly buried in hay in the rear corner, bodies pressed together, mouths gasping like dying fish. Apparently, they had decided to ignore the strictures against the illicit pleasures of the flesh.

Molly glanced up for a moment and her glazed eyes met Jude's. They gazed at each other for a long moment, and Jude thought that her heart was going to shatter into a thousand jagged shards right there on the blanket of hay. Eyes still interlocked with Molly's, Jude turned her head toward Jerry's and finally opened her lips to his. Through angry eyes, she watched Molly watch her as she drew Jerry's tongue into her mouth and placed his rough crustacean hand on her newly swelling breast.

A
S THEY WALKED HOME
from school beneath the flying red Texaco horse, Molly announced that she and Ace had registered together for a Baptist Youth retreat in the Virginia mountains the next weekend. Although she urged Jude to sign up with Jerry, Jude had by now accepted her Waterloo. She had been trying to save Molly from Ace, but she had finally understood that Molly didn't want to be saved.

Since she no longer had anything to lose, Jude said, “I wouldn't even go to heaven if I knew Ace Kilgore would be there.”

Molly's blue eyes flared liquid ice. “Ace may not be very nice sometimes,” she snapped, “but at least he's not boring.”

“Meaning I bore you?” Jude clenched her jaws to keep from crying.

“No, you don't bore me,” said Molly, retreating hastily. “It's just that sometimes I feel a little bit suffocated with you, Jude. It's like you want us to build a cabin on the ridge and stay children forever.”

“Well, you won't have to worry about Ace Kilgore's suffocating you,” muttered Jude, “because he'll probably be in prison soon.”

“You and I are the ones who are in danger of prison,” she said, staring at the sidewalk.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Some of the things we've done—they're just not right.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know.” Molly gazed across the street. “Playing Pecan. All that stuff.”

“What was wrong with it?” It hadn't felt wrong at the time. It had felt right—for both of them. Now Molly, in addition to destroying their future, was rewriting their past.

“Two girls aren't supposed to do that together.”

“Who says?” asked Jude weakly.

“God does,” replied Molly with serene conviction. “The Bible says that a virtuous woman should be a crown to her husband.”

Jude stopped walking and turned to look at her. “Since when have you cared what the Bible says?”

“Since I accepted God as my Lord and Master at that revival.” She looked at Jude with defiance, blue eyes gone stone gray.

As Jude looked back, she felt her jaw fall open. Taking on God as well as Ace Kilgore was clearly hopeless. “But, Molly, I love you,” she said softly, accepting defeat.

For a moment, Molly looked confused, her present self warring with a more ancient one. “Maybe I love you, too, Jude,” she finally replied in a choked voice. “But not like that.”

“Like what?” asked Jude with sudden urgency. She watched Molly closely.

Molly said nothing for a long time, staring hard at a cluster of red ants dragging a dead wasp along the pavement. “Not like that night on the raft.”

T
HE
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
of the Baptist Youth retreat, Jude's father came into the kitchen to ask, “Do you and Molly want to go drive the jeep with me?”

Jude was lying facedown on the fake-brick kitchen linoleum. “Molly's gone.”

He stood over her and looked down. “Oh?”

“She's in Virginia on a retreat.”

“Didn't you want to go, too?”

“No.” Jude had spent the past several days swinging violently between elation and despair. The dream about Molly and herself on the raft hadn't been a dream after all. Or if it had been, Molly had dreamed it, too. Together, they had experienced something profound. After loving each other for nearly a decade, they had set aside the boundaries that normally separated two people. They had merged with each other and with all creation. No one and nothing could ever take that knowledge away from Jude. But Molly wanted to. First she pretended it hadn't happened. Now she insisted it wasn't important.

That afternoon, Jude had forced herself to face the fact that Molly loved Ace
because
he was so awful. She liked the idea of saving a sinner, taming a wild beast, reforming an outlaw. Since he was a bad boy, she could feel like a good girl. Unless Jude could have a personality transplant and become even more wicked than Ace, there was absolutely nothing she could do to compete.

That night in the living room, Aunt Audrey passed Danny to Jude to hold as they all chuckled over the antics of Sid Caesar on “Your Show of Shows.” Danny was cuddly and sweet-smelling in his flannel Dr. Denton's. Holding him upright, Jude let him tread her lap, his chubby legs churning as he pretended to walk. Then he reached out with his tiny, perfect fingers to grab her lower lip. Clutching it, he stared into her eyes with his open, trusting, quizzical gaze. He was so uncomplicated and innocent and vulnerable, loving to seize and examine anything within reach, loving to have any area of his soft velvet skin stroked by anyone anytime. How did an enchanting creature like this turn into an Ace Kilgore? Jude wondered.