Immaculate (24 page)

“But you're my father and
you
don't believe my story, so what chance do I have of convincing strangers who know nothing about me that I'm sincere? That I'm not just some stupid, scared little girl who made a mistake and lied and now doesn't know how to backtrack? Doesn't know how to undo all of the damage she's created? And why do you even want me on TV spreading a story that you still think is a lie? Not just a lie, but a sacrilegious claim that will have me burning in Hell.”

“I don't know, Mina.” He sighed, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “I don't know. You're my daughter, and I can't watch strangers tear you apart like this. I don't think we can sit back and do nothing, I really don't, and this is the best that I have right now.”

“I think it's worth a try, Mina,” Jesse said. “I think you're going to have to put yourself out there and say something at some point if this keeps up, or your silence is going to raise even more questions and suspicions. You'll have to issue some sort of statement at the very least. But maybe you should talk to a lawyer first. This feels way out of our depth.”

I looked to my mom, waiting for her to weigh in with some of her softer, more cautious maternal insights, but she looked too exhausted to disagree.

“Hannah? What do you think?”

Hannah hesitated for a moment, a lock of hair wound tightly around her fingers. “Your dad and Jesse make sense. But I don't want to interfere with the family decision-making.”

“You are family, Han.” I almost said,
And so is Izzy
, because that was how I'd always thought of it—Hannah
and
Izzy were family, a pair, a full set—but I stopped myself just in time.

“Whatever you do,” Jesse cut in, “however you handle it, you all need to be behind it, a unified front.”

“Exactly,” my dad said, nodding in approval.

The room was silent then, all of us lost in our own murky thoughts. Jesse and Hannah got up to say their good-byes soon after, and I walked them both out to the porch. I blew a few misty white
O
s with my breath, the frosty night air feeling amazingly clean and refreshing in my lungs. Hannah gave me a last birthday hug—her eighteenth hug that day, she'd been counting—and looked toward Jesse to start off together for their cars.

Jesse shrugged and shook his head, shoving his hands farther into the wooly pockets of his brown leather jacket. “I'll leave in a few minutes, but you don't have to wait. I wanted to just talk to Mina about something first.”

Hannah's shivering lips turned up in a tiny, fleeting smirk. She blew me a kiss as she turned away, leaving Jesse and me alone in the darkness.

Jesse was standing just a few feet away, but I'd left the porch lights off and it was too shadowy to make out his expression. There was only a soft, muted glow from the front windows, the light from the kitchen filtering out through lacy curtains.

“The present giving got a little disrupted earlier. And I wanted to wait, anyway, to give you my gift when we were alone.”

My breath caught. “You didn't have to give me anything.”

He didn't respond, just reached into his frayed canvas camera bag and pulled out a flat, rectangular package wrapped in old newspaper comics.

“It's nothing much,” he said, clearing his throat as he handed it to me. “But I hope you like it.”

I peeled the paper back carefully, not wanting to tear through any of the cartoon faces or word bubbles because I already knew that I would fold this up and keep it tucked away somewhere safe in my room. When the paper fell away, I could see that it was a canvas underneath, a painting of some sort, but I had to walk over to the window to make out the details. It was a young woman—no, it was
me
, it was definitely me,
I
was the young woman—and I was standing by the window in my room, gazing out over the fields, a peaceful, satisfied little smile playing on my lips. My hands were wrapped around my stomach, cradling my precious bump, and in this portrait it looked like everything made sense. I was a glowing, confident pregnant woman who was looking out over the life and the future that she wanted for herself.

“This is incredible, Jesse,” I whispered. “I knew you were a film guru and everything, but you never told me that you were a painter, too. This looks exactly like me. Or exactly like I wish I could be.”

“You're becoming her, Mina,” he said, the words sounding so simple on his lips. “And I wouldn't call myself a painter. I'm in a painting class right now at school and, I don't know . . . I guess you just inspired me.”

I looked back down at the painting, too lightheaded and giddy to string any adequate words together. As my eyes pored over the finer points, I realized that there was a phrase written in delicate cursive letters along the bottom of the canvas.

“
Dum spiro spero
?” I asked, squinting in the faint light. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, that . . . It's a little corny, I guess,” he said, pausing as he fiddled with a zipper on his bag. “Kind of a Spero family saying.
Spero
means ‘I hope' in Italian and Latin, and it's a Latin proverb: ‘While I breathe, I hope.' I thought it fit with the painting's theme. It fits with you.”

While I breathe . . . I hope.

I set the canvas down on the windowsill and slowly moved closer to him. “Jesse. This is the most special gift anyone has ever given me.”

I smiled up at him in the dark and watched as his head dipped down toward my upturned face. Before I even realized it was happening, his lips brushed against mine, warm and pillow soft, still so sweet with frosting and cider. His hands brushed lightly against my cheeks, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him closer as I kissed him back. I reached up to twist a strand of his hair, his striking black hair, the color of fresh ink and midnight sky. And for a few seconds I was completely happy, spiraling and soaring in sparkly golden clouds, angels singing, every cliché I'd ever heard suddenly becoming strangely, brilliantly true. It was as if something had burst open inside of me, some radiant sparkle of joy that had never had a chance to show itself before that moment—a prize, a reward, for finding my way to this place, this person.

But then, in a sharp flash of reality, I could feel my belly pressed oddly and uncomfortably against him, the unnatural fit of his flat stomach clashing with my round one. The entire moment dipped and swayed and slipped out of my grasp.

I was pregnant, and the baby was not his. I was pregnant, and my life was a mess.

I was pregnant—and I had no right to be kissing anyone at all.

No matter how much I wanted to be.

“Jesse,
no
.” I forced myself to pull back. “We can't be doing this. It just doesn't feel right. I have too many things to figure out, and I won't drag you into it. You're too good of a friend, and I don't want to jeopardize that.”

“What if I want to be dragged into it?”

“It's not fair to you. And people are already talking enough as it is. We don't need to add fuel to their ideas.”

“I don't care what people are saying. You should know that about me by now. We know the truth, so screw their lies.”

“I
do
care. This is my life.”

“Are you worried about what Nate would say?”

I laughed without meaning to, and the sound of it made me wince. “Nate? No, of course not. Nate can say whatever he wants. Nate and I have nothing anymore.”

He paused a few beats too long.

“Okay. I understand.” He turned around and looked out over the pitch black of the driveway. “It's too much right now. I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I shouldn't have just kissed you like that.”

“You didn't make me uncomfortable. I just . . . It can't be like that. Right now my life has to be about the baby. Only about the baby.”

“I get it. Don't worry, really. I get it. Let's just pretend that never happened, okay? It's cold out and you don't have a jacket, so you should get back inside, anyway.” He gave a small wave and tugged his hood up as he jogged toward the truck.

A nauseating swell of regret made me want to call out after him, but I pushed it back down. I would have to erase that kiss from my mind. An eighteen-year-old single mom didn't have time for romance and all the complications that came along with a relationship. Especially not when she had an angry mob of strangers to deal with first and foremost.

Jesse would understand. Jesse would move on.

And hopefully, someday, I would, too.

chapter fourteen

Ten days.

Ten flaps left to open on the Advent calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.

Ten more pieces of star-shaped chocolates to pop out of the ten remaining small windows that opened into the cozy winter village scene—round puffs of smoke rising from the chimneys, bundled-up carolers open-mouthed on front stoops and grinning children peeking from behind curtains, a glowing tree in the center town square.

Ten days before Christmas and then maybe, just maybe, life could get a little bit easier. Not surprisingly, the whole “pregnant virgin” story seemed especially popular during the holiday season. But soon it would be a new year, with its own new stories. People disappeared come January. Crawled back into their own little houses and their own little lives and didn't poke their heads out into the fresh air again until the first early spring breeze come late March. And by late March, I wouldn't be a pregnant virgin anymore. I would be a mother, and maybe at some point the media and all the thousands of people who couldn't get enough of Virgin Mina would become bored. They wouldn't forget—the story, the idea, the image of my face would still linger in their minds, a memorable curiosity to turn over through the years, to pull out occasionally when dinner conversations became entirely exhausted—but I would no longer be a subject for prime-time TV. Reporters would run out of angles, the story would be flat and stale. The well would run dry.

And then I would get my life back.

The house phone started ringing, and two chimes in I remembered that I was home alone and that no one else would be answering. My parents and Gracie were Christmas shopping at the mall, but after the news broke, I'd stopped going most public places other than school, really. Shopping online might lack Santa's village and twinkling greenery, but it also lacked gawking moms and wide-eyed kids without filters—kids like the boy last week who stopped me at the grocery store and asked how I knew that my baby wouldn't be a flesh-eating alien who could eat its way straight out of my belly. Oh yes, online shopping would most definitely do just fine.

I'd left my job at Frankie's behind, too, in the aftermath. It was hard to put an end to the income flow, but it had all become too much—the stares, both real and imagined, and the religious imagery plastered all along the walls. It wasn't only the eyes of the customers I could feel tracing my movements around the room. The life-size Madonna portrait was like the Mona Lisa, her gaze pinning me down no matter where I stood. And besides that, the need I'd had to stay connected to Iris, to catch her again on that off chance—it felt less confined to Frankie's now, after that moment in the cafeteria. Maybe she was just as likely to show up anywhere at all. Maybe she'd know where to find me no matter where I went.

I sighed as I pushed myself up from the kitchen table, where I'd been flipping mindlessly through a special new mothers magazine Hannah had picked up for me at the pharmacy. My mom was still collecting last-minute RVSPs for a holiday party that she was holding at the historical society the next week, and I felt guilty ignoring a call from any of the sweet old ladies who generally attended my mom's events.

I grabbed for the phone right before the answering machine could click on.

“Hello?”

“I'd like to speak to Mina Dietrich, please.” The voice was high-pitched and booming, and I detected at least a slight Southern accent in those first few words.

“Mina speaking. And this is . . . ?”

“Gladys from Richmond. Richmond, Virginia.”

“Hi, Gladys from Richmond. Can I . . . can I help you with something?”

“I'm just calling to tell you that I think it's downright disturbing, this blasphemous black Devil lie you keep on spreading around our God-fearing country. During the very season of Our Lord, nonetheless! You ought to be so powerfully ashamed of yourself. And your parents! I don't know how your parents sleep a wink at night.”

My blood chilled, froze solid like tiny piercing crystals of ice lodged in my veins. She might have been hundreds of miles away, but her voice, coming from the phone in my kitchen—my family's very own kitchen, our safe haven—made me feel completely violated.

“How did you get my number?”

“Well, I'm sure I could have found it in the phone listings on my own if I'd tried, but as it is, it was just posted on the Internet this morning. It was the latest post on that Virgin Mina website that everyone's been talking about. They're encouraging people to speak out directly—you know, have a real dialogue with you about our thoughts.”

“Your thoughts?” I hissed into the phone. “I don't know you. You don't know me. You're not entitled to call me in my own home with your thoughts about my life.”

She snorted, a sort of
harrumph
sound, and then continued. “I saw that piddly fluff ball of an interview you did for KBC last week, and let me tell you, it was obvious from where I was sitting that you really have nothing to say for yourself. ‘I can't explain how this happened,'” she quoted, her voice taking on a nasally, offensive edge as she attempted to imitate me, “‘but no, I'm not claiming to be God's chosen either. I'm just trying to do the right thing.' Because that's just plain old nonsense. If you knew—if you really knew with every fiber of your being, your soul—that you were innocent, then how could this be anything
but
a miracle? How could you be anything
but
chosen? But you won't say either of those things because you know that you're lying, and I suppose it's good to see that you at least have enough decency to close your mouth when it comes to the most sacred claims. Mind you, I still think you'll be going straight to the Devil if you keep up with the path you're on now, and . . .”

I hung up and threw the phone down onto the counter, watched as it skittered and spun in precarious circles edging closer and closer to the sink. Good. Let it get ruined. Let me be inaccessible to the whole world of strangers who now had our number, just in case they wanted to “dialogue” with me this morning, tonight, tomorrow, whenever they so desired. I edged my back along the cabinets as I sank to the floor and buried my head in my hands. Her patronizing tone still rattled in my ears, making my whole body shake.

She was right. The KBC interview I'd agreed to last week
had
been a joke. A totally insubstantial, useless filler story that did little if nothing to help my case. I blushed, stuttered, rambled about my good grades and my regular church attendance while my hyperdilated eyes darted everywhere but at the camera or the reporter sitting across from me on our living room sofa. Based on the feedback I saw on the website after the report first aired—and again after the reposting of the video online—the majority of viewers concluded that the nervous tics more than proved my guilty conscience. Only a few outsiders suggested I was endearingly confused, crazy and delusional rather than an outright pathological liar.

“You'll just have to do better next time,” my dad had said under his breath, all of us gathered in front of the TV, stone-faced and hushed, for the first prime-time viewing. So far, I hadn't let there be a next time, despite the daily flood of new requests. One failed attempt was enough to convince me that there was nothing I could say to change the public opinion. My story was weak. There were no facts. There were no theories. I had no supporting evidence, no photographic proof, no witnesses other than Jesse, and I refused to let him burn under the spotlight next to me.

But as I played over Gladys from Richmond's call, I was most upset, I realized, by her claim that if I was so certain, if I was
so absolutely positive
that this baby had come about by nothing short of divine intervention, than I would be claiming my “chosen” status with pride and courage. That there could be no room for uncertainty.

But how could I know—how could anyone in the world know—that miracles were, by necessity and without a doubt, the plan, the doing, the sign of God? Of a god, of any god? And if so, which god? Whose god? Last I checked, there was more than just one perception of God, so why should I assume that this was the work of the same god as in
my
Bible? The god I learned about in Sunday School and the god who almost everyone in Green Hill considered to be the “true God”—the “one and only God.”

Perhaps there were miracles
outside
of the church. Miracles outside of any realm that we knew, and outside of any logic system that we as mere humans could even begin to wrap our heads around. I was starting to think that ancient cultures—the Maya, Celtics, Egyptians, Buddhists, Native Americans—had a much more sensible view of the way things worked, the divinity to be found in nature, the world all around us, the sun, the moon, the trees, the changing of seasons and the forces of weather.

“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.”

It was a line I'd stumbled across over and over during my online scouring for miracles, a quote from Saint Augustine of Hippo, born in the fourth century, a Latin philosopher and theologian from the African Province of the Roman Empire often considered to be one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time. I had researched him afterward, excited that he had so eloquently summed up my own thoughts—my hopes that there was more to nature and its phenomenal possibilities than met the eye—but I didn't see much else in his writings that I agreed with or could absorb as my own belief system. But I still had this one quote, this sentiment of faith, a new perspective for the kind of miracle I was experiencing in my here and now.

And I needed that, desperately. Needed something to cling to, nails dug deeply in, no matter how insubstantial or removed the idea might be. It's not as if Iris had outlined the greater scheme to me. There was no name-dropping, no finger pointing to who exactly was calling the shots or if “they” had any concrete plans for the baby once he or she was walking, breathing, living on planet Earth alongside me. After nearly seven months of pregnancy, I still hadn't come to many conclusions. What I knew, or thought I knew, to be true on some inner, metaphysical level, came to a very short list: This, this baby, this
asexual
form of reproduction, was an inexplicable, unprecedented scientific phenomenon. It was the work of some power—some much, much higher power—beyond our limited understanding as the insignificant peons temporarily wandering around this planet. For reasons that were entirely undecipherable to me, I was the person who would bring this mysterious creation into life.

And I would care for this creation, protect and love this baby, for the rest of my life, regardless of whether or not I ever came any closer to understanding the heart of it all:
why?

Why, why, why?

One syllable, three letters, yet it still had more power over me than any other word I'd ever known. I'd always been the type of person who needed answers, which is probably why I'd been such a naturally good student. Teachers asked questions, and I'd study until I could answer them. But then came this question, the biggest question of my life, and I would probably never have an explanation, any real sort of resolution. My own
sort of, kind of
, innate and intuitive answers would have to be good enough. Somebody or something was clearly trying to teach me a lesson.

There was no perfect answer. Just like there was no perfect way to
live
.

I had tried, after all, for almost eighteen years. And now, with more ups and downs and unexpected loops than in the rest of my life combined, I somehow, oddly, felt more alive than ever.

The phone rang again from the counter and I held my breath, counting the rings as I waited for the answering machine to pop to life. Eight, nine, ten. Gracie's sunny, giggly voice chirped from the speakers and made me feel even more alone. I needed the real Gracie.
Hiyah! You've reached the Dietrich house! We're not around to talk right now, so pretty please leave us a message. Bye!

“This is Elliot Ste—err—Elliot S from Ohio.” He spoke in a hurried, breathy whisper, his words smeared through the speakers from holding the phone too close to his anxious lips. “I'm calling for Mina. I wanted to say that it's not too late to be forgiven. Not
quite
yet, not without one last warning. Come clean with the Lord and let Him back into your life. Open your heart to God, and let Him wash away this blackness from your soul. Acknowledge your sins to your family, to yourself, and to your country. You're on a very dark and dangerous path, Mina Dietrich. And if you don't repent soon, if you don't admit to your Devil's lies, then you deserve to be punished. I know where you live. We all do. And we'll find you, Mina. If you don't stop on your own, then we'll find a way to stop you.” He finished with a flourish, breathing into the phone raggedly for a moment before the machine finally beeped and fell back into silence.