Saint Maybe (20 page)

In the baby pool, Sister Audrey stood ankle-deep and bent over with her hands in the water. Johnny Larson was emptying a sprinkling can on top of Percy’s head. Daphne was … Thomas couldn’t see Daphne. He waded toward the edge of his own pool to check, and that’s when he realized that the thing in Sister Audrey’s hands was Daphne’s little blue-flowered body.

Later, he couldn’t remember how he got out of the water so fast. It almost seemed he was lifted straight up. Then he was running, with the sharp, stubbly grass pricking his bare feet, and then he was flying through the air as level as a Frisbee and belly flopping into the baby pool where Daphne lay on her stomach, smiling, making splashy little pretend-swim motions while Sister Audrey supported her.

He grabbed hold of Daphne anyway. (It seemed he’d been wound with a key and had to follow through with this.) He struggled to his feet, staggering a bit, hanging onto her even though she squirmed and protested. “You leave her alone,” he told Sister Audrey. Sister Audrey stared at him; her mouth was partway open. Thomas hauled Daphne out of the pool, dumped her in a heap, brushed off his hands all businesslike, and then strode back to the big pool.

As soon as he was in the water, the others crowded around him asking, “What’d she do? What happened?” Sister Myra looked confused. (For once, she had missed something.) Thomas said, “I just don’t like her messing with my little sister, is all.” He set his jaw and gazed beyond them, over toward the baby pool. Sister Audrey was standing on dry ground now. She was concentrating on stepping back into her flip-flops, and something about her lowered head and her meek, blind smile made Thomas’s stomach all at once start hurting. He turned away. “Boy, you were
out
of here,” Dermott Kyle said admiringly.

“Oh, well, you do what you got to do,” Thomas told him.

Toweled dry and dressed, their swimsuits hanging on the line outdoors and their hair still damp, they gathered for Devotions. Sister Myra said, “Dear Lord, thank You for this day of fellowship and listen now to
our silent prayers,” and then she left a long, long space afterward. Silent prayers were sort of like Afternoon Swim; you had the feeling she was too worn out to make the effort anymore.
Everyone
was worn out. Still, Thomas tried. He bowed his head and closed his eyes and prayed for his mother in heaven. He knew she was up there, watching over him. And he knew his prayers were being heard. Hadn’t he prayed for Ian not to go to Vietnam that time? And the draft notice came anyhow and Thomas had blamed God, but then the doctors found out Ian had an extra heartbeat that had never been heard before and never given a moment’s trouble since, and Thomas knew his prayer had been answered. He’d stood up at Public Amending the following Sunday and confessed how he had doubted, but everyone was so happy about Ian that they just smiled at him while he spoke. He had felt he was surrounded by loving feelings. Afterward, Reverend Emmett said he thought Thomas had not really sinned, just shown his ignorance; and he was confident it would never happen again. And sure enough, it hadn’t.

“In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen,” Sister Myra said.

They all rustled and jostled and pushed each other, glad to be moving again.

It was Agatha’s turn to sit in front, but Ian said they should all three sit in back because he was picking up Cicely on the way home. “She’s coming for supper,” he told them. “It’s a state occasion: Aunt Claudia’s birthday. Remember?”

No, they hadn’t remembered, even though they’d spent last evening making a birthday card. Daphne said, “Oh, goody,” because that meant all the cousins would be there. Thomas and Agatha were glad, too—especially on account of Cicely. They both thought Cicely was as pretty as a movie star.

Ian asked Daphne what the day’s Bible verse had been. Daphne said, “Um …” and looked down into her lap. She was sitting in the middle, with her legs sticking straight out in front of her and the lawn mower resting across her knees.

“Agatha?” Ian called back, turning onto Charles Street.

Agatha sighed. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,” she said flatly, “so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.”

She mumbled the word “God,” so she almost didn’t say it at all, but Ian appeared not to notice. “Good for you,” he said. “And what did Reverend Emmett talk about?”

Agatha didn’t answer, so Thomas spoke up instead. “Juice,” he said.

“Juice?”

“How we get juice for the soul and juice for the body, both at once, in Bible camp.”

“Well, that’s very true,” Ian said.

“It’s very dumb,” Agatha said.

“Pardon?”

“Besides,” she said, “isn’t ‘juice’ a bad word?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It just has that sound to it, somehow, like maybe it could be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ian said. They had reached a red light, and he was able to glance over his shoulder at her. “Juice? What?”

“And that pool is full of germs; I think everybody pees in it,” Agatha said. “And Sister Audrey makes the sandwiches so far ahead they’re all dried out before we get to eat them. And anyhow, what’s she doing in a children’s camp? A person who’d put a baby in a Dempster Dumpster!”

By now, those words were like some secret joke.
Thomas giggled. Ian looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“You’re laughing?” he asked.

Thomas got serious.

“You think Sister Audrey is funny?”

A driver behind them honked his horn; the light had turned green. Ian didn’t seem to hear. “She’s just a kid,” he told Thomas. “She’s not much older than you are, and had none of your advantages. I can’t believe you would find her situation comical.”

“Ian, cars are getting mad at us,” Agatha said.

Ian sighed and started driving again.

I’m just a kid too
, Thomas wanted to tell him.
How would I know what her situation is?

They took a left turn. Daphne sucked her thumb and slid her curled index finger back and forth across her upper lip, the way she liked to do when she was tired. Thomas kept his eyes wide open so no one would see the tears. He wished he had his grandma. Ian was his favorite person in the world, but when you were sad or sick to your stomach who did you want? Not Ian. Ian had no soft nooks to him. Thomas tipped his head back against the seat and felt his eyes growing cool in the breeze from the window.

On Lang Avenue, with its low white houses and the sprinklers spinning under the trees, Ian parked and got out. He climbed the steps to Cicely’s porch, meanwhile taking off his cap. “Ooh,” Agatha said. “He’s got horrible hat-head.” Thomas had never heard the phrase before, but he saw instantly what she meant. All around Ian’s shiny brown hair the cap had left a deep groove. “He looks like a goop,” Agatha said. That was her way of comforting Thomas, he knew. It didn’t really help much, but he tried to smile anyhow.

When Cicely came to the door, she was wearing bell-bottom
jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. A beaded Indian headband held back her long messy waterfall of curls. First she stood on her toes and gave Ian a kiss. (All three of them watched carefully from the car. For a while now they had been worrying that Cicely didn’t like Ian as much as she used to.) Then she waved at them and started down the porch steps. Ian followed, clamping his cap back on.

Daphne took her thumb out of her mouth. “Hi, Cicely!” she called.

“Well, hey, gang,” Cicely said. “How we doing?” She opened the door on the passenger side and slid across to the middle of the front seat. The car filled with the moldy smell of the perfume she’d started wearing.

Ian got in on the driver’s side and asked, “Have a good day at work?”

“Great,” Cicely said. (This summer she worked part-time at a shop where they made leather sandals.) She moved over very close to him and brushed a wood shaving off his shoulder. “How was
your
day?”

“Well, we got a new order,” Ian said.

“Right on!”

He pulled into traffic and said, “This woman came all the way from Massachusetts with a blanket box, her great-grandfather’s blanket box. Asked if we knew how to make one just like it, using the same methods. Exactly the kind of thing Mr. Brant likes best.”

Cicely made a sort of humming noise and nestled in against him.

“Soon as she left Mr. Brant told me, ‘Go call those kitchen people.’ People who wanted an estimate on their kitchen cabinets. ‘Call and cancel,’ he said. Cicely hon, stop that, please.”

“Stop what?” she asked him, in a smiling voice.

“You know what.”

“I’m not doing anything!” she said. She sat up straight. She slid over to her side of the car and set her face toward the window. “Mr. Holiness,” she muttered to a fire hydrant.

“Pretty soon we may give up kitchens altogether,” Ian said, turning down Waverly. He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “We’ll build nothing but fine furniture. Custom designs. Old-style joinery.”

Cicely wasn’t listening. All three of them sitting in back could tell that, just from the way she kept her face turned. But Ian said, “We might hire another worker, too. At least, Mr. Brant’s thinking about it. I said, ‘Good, hire several, and give me a raise while you’re at it,’ and he said he might do it. ‘I won’t be a single man forever,’ I told him.” Ian glanced over at Cicely when he said that, but Cicely was still looking out the window.

It was amazing, how he could talk on like that without realizing. When even they realized! Even little Daphne, sucking her thumb and watching Cicely with round, anxious eyes!

Thomas all at once felt so angry at Ian that he jumped out of the car in a rush and slammed the door loudly behind him.

Their grandma said they had to change clothes at once, this instant, because Aunt Claudia was arriving at five-thirty and they looked as if they’d spent the day rolling in a barnyard. She told Ian to run Daphne a bath, and she said, “Clean shirts for the other two! And clean shorts for Thomas. Hair combed. Faces washed.”

But the minute Ian’s back was turned, Thomas followed Agatha up the narrow, steep wooden stairs to
the attic. He trailed her into the slanty-ceilinged attic bedroom that was hers and Daphne’s, that used to be Aunt Claudia’s when she was a girl at home. “Agatha,” he said, putting on a fake frown, “do you think we should’ve bought Aunt Claudia a present? Maybe a card will be too boring.”

What he was after, of course, was a glimpse of their mother’s jewelry box. He knew Agatha had to open it to return the mustard seed.

“You heard what Grandma said,” Agatha told him. “A handmade card means more than anything. What are you in my room for?”

“But she gives
us
presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”

“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”

“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”

“Get out, I tell you.”

“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”

“No, you can’t.”

“She wasn’t only
your
mama, you know.”

“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”

“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”

“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.

“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”

“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”

“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”

“You’ll get it dirty.”

“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”

She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.

“Well, okay,” she said finally.

“You’ll let me?”

“But just for a minute.”

She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic—the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things—maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once when he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.

She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.

It was a color photograph, with
JUN
63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks—black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress—holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.

If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.

It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person—as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.

“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.

“You don’t remember being there?”

“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”