Lay It on My Heart (20 page)

Phoebe pinches the bridge of her nose like she has a headache. “My point,” she says, “the point I started to make, is that I am your mother. And the Abraham thing? You can't tell me your feelings wouldn't be hurt if I tried to sacrifice you. Things are different now, that's all. Like divorce. We can look at it and say, What did divorce mean during biblical times, and what does it mean during these times?”

The word
divorce
hangs in the air between us, delicate as a bubble. If I touch it, it will burst and cover everything.

“Are you listening?” she asks. “What did I just say?”

“Things are different now,” I recite in a singsong voice. It's the unbearable voice of Little Marcy, the child narrator of Bible stories on a record I used to listen to before falling asleep. Only my Little Marcy voice is poisonous.

Phoebe sucks in her breath. “I wish you could tell me what I ever did to you that you talk to me that way. When I most need you. Seriously, Charmaine. Families in crisis have to stick together.”

“Isn't Daddy your family?”

“We're all family. Even Daze is our family, if just by marriage.”

“She's my family by more than marriage. I'm her blood kin.”

“Listen to you. ‘Kin.' You're picking up the way they talk down here. My point is about support.”

“My point,” I say, “is that you're the one talking about divorce, to another man, when your husband's in the hospital. Is that what you mean by support?”

Then she slaps me. I don't see it coming, and her hand catches me full on the face. “When did you become such a little viper?” she says.

The world stops for two seconds and then starts up again. I don't feel like crying, not even a little. I feel calm. It's easy to keep a blank expression now, and I wonder if this is how Kelly-Lynn feels all the time.

Phoebe recovers fast. “I'm sorry.” She claps her hands over her own face. “I'm so sorry.”

“Can I get out of the car, now?”

“Yeah,” she says, which is a word she never uses or lets me use. She believes in “Let your yes be yes and your no, no.”

A couple of fat drops catch me on the way in to the cabin. Phoebe stays in the car, and in the dark I fumble with my key and let myself in. It feels too late to start my homework, which I haven't been keeping up with very well, anyway. I can't even remember anything about school at this point, despite the fact that I spent the first eight hours of my day there. Titus is not inside. I see, with panic, that I have forgotten to leave the window over the sink open for him. I wrench it open now and call out. The only answer is the soft rushing of the river. I open the rest of the windows in the trailer and turn all the lights on so that he'll know we're home.

In the tiny bathroom I stand in the shower to change into my nightclothes. I brush my teeth, wipe my nose and chin with witch hazel, and touch my reddened cheek. My eyes peer out from behind my face, serious and unfamiliar.

Back in the main part of the cabin, Phoebe has already spread the narrow tweed couch with my sheets, pillow, and a blanket, which I usually do myself. She's standing by the kitchen sink, looking out into the night and holding a plastic cup of water. Her face is wet.

“I forgot to leave the window open for Titus,” I say.

“He'll be okay,” she says. She drains her cup then fills it again at the tap. “I don't expect you to understand this. But I can't remember the last time your father showed the tiniest bit of interest in anything I had to say. He's never heard a gol-rammed thing over the voice of God. So it felt good to talk to Morris. Doctor Osborne. I'm sorry about that. That in itself is probably not okay to feel. Not when I'm a married woman. And if you don't mind, I would really appreciate it if you didn't tell your grandmother.”

Phoebe downs the rest of her water and upends the cup in the drain. I crawl under the covers.

“I know the two of you are close,” she says. “I know you tell her more than you tell me.”

“I won't tell her,” I say.

“I'm coming apart,” Phoebe says. “I'm very sorry I raised a hand to you, but I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.”

Instead of washing up in the bathroom, instead of pulling the curtains and changing into her nightclothes in front of me in the way I hate, she climbs the built-in ladder to the loft, clothes and all.

And because for once she hasn't asked me for a good-night hug, hasn't told me she loves me and waited for me to say it back, I feel like I could tell her, right now, that I love her. And I almost want to tell her. And to ask her to please not get a divorce. And not to come apart. And to say that it would make me feel bad, it would make me feel terrible, if she tried to sacrifice me. All of this swells up in me to say, but I don't know what that would mean at a time like this, what else she might expect from me, so I keep it all to myself and turn out the light and dream that I'm a child again.

I
N THE MORNING, TITUS
has still not come home. The rain continues slow and heavy, and I pretend to be asleep until Phoebe drives off for her Saturday errands in town. Then I pull on the homemade Levi's and a dirty shirt and head outside. He's probably holed up somewhere dry, under someone's house or car. He might even be in one of those caves in the palisades, where my father has told me bats cling to the ceilings like furry, upside-down carpeting. You can get bitten by a bat and not even know it because their teeth are thinner than needles. Bats carry rabies, and Titus may or may not have had his rabies booster last year, because he was an indoor cat.

I check the river first. Rain soaks through my clothes right away and trickles down my scalp. But the wetter I get, the warmer it feels. When I step out onto our wooden dock, it creaks, pulling against the ropes that hold it to the stake my father sank deep into the garden. Today the river is a rushing brown froth, chopping up higher than usual against the edges of the bank, depositing things in the scrub and the low-hanging limbs of trees—twigs, a plastic bag, leaves. Nothing that looks like a dead cat, thankfully. I try not to look at the bridge high above, though my father says cats survive falls better than most animals. Something about how loose their bones are.

“Titus,” I call, but in the rain the sound seems to die two feet in front of my face. I cup my hands to make a megaphone. “Kitty, kitty.”

I hike back across the weedy lawn and start down the river road in the opposite direction of the bridge. If I were a Catholic, I could pray to a specific saint, maybe even a saint of lost cats. I wipe at the pen marks on my thumb. The earliest of them have already faded to pale blue. I am not good at prayer without ceasing, but I can hardly think how else to pray anymore, without suggesting to God that there might be things that are more important to me than him. Like my father coming home, like finding Titus, like everything going back to the way it was before. Maybe what I should be praying is for God to change my heart so that he really is more important than the other things, the same way he was more important to Abraham than Isaac was. Because when Abraham proved it by raising the knife to sacrifice Isaac, God didn't take Isaac away after all. So I pray for that, quickly, before I start to worry about my ulterior motive. Then I pray for my three Operation Outreach people, that I'll have better progress to share when I do see my father, so that he won't despair of his vision for the county. Then I pray
Inhabit me, O Lord God
and try to muster up some perseverance, because with more than fifty hatch marks on my hand for effort, I still don't feel inhabited, and even though I know it is sinful to pray with expectation, I definitely didn't expect things to get harder the harder I tried. I wish there was a medicine I could take that would do the opposite of what they're doing to my father—speed my brain up instead of slowing it down. Then maybe I could hear God's voice, or at least keep on praying while I did everything else. I rub my hands against my jeans, scrubbing off the ink marks as best I can to make a clean space for starting over.

The rain blows across the road in sheets. Even the inside of my ears are wet now, and I'm not warm anymore. Titus could be anywhere. He could be up a tree, and there are hundreds of trees. I call for him a couple more times, then turn in the other direction, back past the trailer-cabin and downriver, calling and looking, looking and calling, until I reach the base of the bridge. The concrete foot is twice as tall as I am, bigger than the whole trailer-cabin. Underneath my palms, its surface is cool and rough. I feel, more than I have ever felt the presence of God, the presence of this bridge, running through every distant point of it like a current, then right down my spine. It's not hard to understand why people are drawn to it, why they might even want to jump. It's not hard to imagine how, for the second before you let go, you could feel like you were one with the bridge and nothing bad would happen. I close my eyes and whisper
Inhabit me, O Lord God
over and over, but it feels like I am talking to the bridge instead.

Back in the trailer-cabin I peel off my wet clothes and slip into my nightgown. The rain beats hard against the tin roof. It has soaked through the towel under the window I've left open for Titus. Phoebe has taped up our “house rules” onto the tiny refrigerator door, and the edges of the paper are curling away from the wall.

I've forgotten all about the envelope from Seth's closet. It's right where I left it, inside my wooden box, and when I lift the flap, a short stack of pictures spills out. I'm thinking maybe they'll be naked pictures, but I can't even make out anything in the first one. There's red and brown and black, and some stringy things, and where the flash hits it, it shines like something wet. The next picture is of the same thing, only from farther away. Now you can see it's on pavement somewhere, and the black stuff might be oil. But it's not oil, it's blood. With shreds of red cloth mixed in. The next picture is from even farther back, so you can see, below the mess, a pair of legs in jeans, lying sideways on the pavement. The cloth is part of a shirt. It's a person. Now, where the face should be, I see upper teeth. A closed eye. There is no lower jaw anymore at all, and I don't know how I didn't see the eye and teeth first thing, because there they are in the first picture, the close-up, when I look again.

Besides a deer, once, the only dead thing I've ever seen is a mouse Titus brought me. The mouse looked like a tiny gray shoe, and the possibility that it might recover and begin moving made it seem extra still. The picture wouldn't be so bad if you couldn't tell the thing had been a person, but you can. And now I see something else in the picture, on the pavement near a black boot, and I'm leaning with my nose close to the photograph when I figure out it's a torn-off thumb, and I barely make it to the sink before I throw up.

The last photo is the naked one. It's a very pale body, a woman's, with the trunk cut open all the way down to her privates. The skin is peeled back from the middle, and the ribs are gone, and all the organs show, nestled in with each other like blind, sleeping creatures. You can't tell how old she was or how she died. Her arms and hands lie at her sides, and her legs have rotated outward just a little, and the privates are so close to the camera that you can see them right through the dark curly hair.

But what gets to me, what I am lingering over when Phoebe pulls in, are the breasts. They're still attached to the skin of the woman's chest, only the skin is stretched inside out, parted to either side of her body. The breasts are all turned around, on the underside of the skin now. I stuff the photos back into the envelope, and the envelope into the butt purse. But it's as if I've taken the dead woman into my eyes and now I can't
not
see her. It's as if, also, the heavy ache in my own breasts is connected somehow to hers—slumped out of shape onto the shoulders, half underneath the inside-out skin. Nipples pointing away from the body in opposite directions, as if ashamed to watch the excavation below.

All day it rains. Even though September is usually the driest month. After a brief, near-silent lunch, Phoebe returns to the loft to sleep. I look for Titus again, in all the same places. I try to pray, forget, try, forget, try. In the trailer-cabin, with Phoebe still sleeping, I think about starting homework and end up rereading
A
Wrinkle in Time
right through to the end, again, where everyone gets back home before dinner, even though they've passed through black holes to other planets, other solar systems, maybe. Phoebe keeps sleeping. For dinner I drink two of my father's cans of tomato juice and listen to the river, which sounds faster. And closer. Before dark I head out one more time and am alarmed to see the water lapping high, our dock rocking violently, pulling the ropes taut. Before the rain, only the lowest tree branches skimmed the water, but now whole limbs dip below the surface, battered by the current.

Back in the cabin I wake Phoebe and tell her the river's rising. She yawns, scoots to the edge of the loft, then leans her head toward the window. “How far is it up the bank?” she wants to know, and I tell her I'm not sure. Maybe a couple of feet. She climbs down from the loft and heads outside, barefoot, with the flashlight. She grew up not far from the Cumberland River in Tennessee, which was a lot bigger than this one, she likes to say. From the window I watch the light move dimly through the rain, stop at the top of the bank, then return. “If it hits the top of the bank, we should probably head out of the gorge,” she says as she dries off. “But I don't think the rain's going to keep up this way.”

“I'm not leaving without Titus,” I say.

“Titus probably knows more about the water rising than we do,” she says. “From smell or something. Let's not borrow trouble. I'm wiped out, Charmaine. I don't mean to sleep all day, but I don't know when I've felt so tired.” She climbs back up into the loft. “I'll check again in an hour or so.”