The Grave of God's Daughter (12 page)

T
HIRD WAS DESERTED
. Lights were on in the apartments, but no one was in the alley because it was suppertime. The tramping sound of our footfalls on the mud was accompanied by the lonely sobbing of Mrs. Koshchushko, which eventually blended in with the wind.

Martin was plodding along at my side, barely keeping up. I took his hand and held it as we walked. His small fingers curled limply in my palm. My grip was the only thing keeping us together.

I led Martin toward the river. Like the nuns, my mother had forbidden us from going there, but I thought Martin deserved to do something he might like. The wind was stronger along the water. I still had my skirt on, and the cold was seeping through my tights. My toes tingled and the skin on my legs felt like stone, yet I
kept walking. We reached the river and I guided Martin to the top of the stairway overlooking the shoreline. Moonlight was glinting on the water below and reflecting the long, orange silhouette of the cross on the other side of the river. The cross wriggled over the ripples, wavering on the water’s surface as though it was sinking.

“I hate him,” Martin said.

“Don’t say that.”

“I can if I want. I hate him. And I want him to die just like Joe died.”

I gripped Martin’s hand hard enough that he tried to pull away. “Don’t say that, Martin. Don’t ever say that.”

“That’s what she would say,” he countered.

“Pray with me, Marty. We have to pray quickly.”

I dragged him down to his knees, and we knelt together on the top step of the stairs, facing the cross.

“Say a Hail Mary. Say it with me, Marty.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Say it.”

In unison, we began rattling off the prayer in Polish. Martin was mumbling and squirming. “This hurts my knees,” he whined. “Can’t we stand up?”

“No. Keep praying.”

I was squeezing my eyes shut and wrapping my breath around each word. My knees were digging into the step, grinding the cold flesh against the wood. I could have moved, shifted my weight, but I thought I deserved to be in pain. I deserved to hurt for what my lies had done to Martin.

We finished the prayer, yet it didn’t feel like enough. “Now tell God you’re sorry for what you said and that you take it back.”

“I will not.”

“Just say it, Marty, please. You have to or else…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Or else what?” He pushed to hear me say it aloud.

“You know what.”

“All right. I’m sorry, God,” he huffed.

“Now say you didn’t mean it.”

“I didn’t mean it.” His words were hardly sincere, though all that mattered was that he had said them, that God had heard him.

The whistle for the steel mill wailed, signaling the shift change.

“Now can we go?” Martin asked.

“We can go.”

I had to pry myself up from my knees. The cold had nearly frozen me in place. I envisioned myself being trapped there in prayer like a statue, an icy reminder to other children not to do what I had done. The reflection of the neon cross bobbed on the river’s surface, bidding us farewell.

I
TOOK
M
ARTIN BACK HOME
the short route, down River Road. Along the way, we passed the crumbling house where the old woman lived. At night, the decrepit facade was even more forbidding. No lights shone from inside. The house appeared empty.

“See that house,” I said. “There’s a lady who lives in there who I’ve never seen before.”

“Uh-huh.” Martin was uninterested and still mad at me for what I’d made him do.

“No, really. I’ve never seen her in town or at the market or at church or anywhere. It’s strange, don’t you think?”

“Maybe you didn’t really see her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard that house is empty. That nobody lives there. So maybe you saw a lady at the house, but she wasn’t really
there.
”

“She was too. I brought a delivery to her. She took it right out of my hand.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

I tried to recall if she’d spoken, then remembered that the woman hadn’t actually uttered a word to me. “No, she didn’t.”

“Then maybe it was a ghost.”

“She’s not a ghost,” I protested. “She was real. I saw her.”

Martin shrugged indifferently as we passed the house, leaving it alone in the night. He was trying to scare me the way I’d scared him by suggesting that he would go to hell for what he’d said about our father. The thought that what I saw wasn’t real, that the woman I had encountered could be a ghost, perched in my mind until we reached the apartment.

Our plates were set out and the food was already on them. My mother had chopped the fish into small hunks, making it almost unrecognizable—
almost.

“Go wash up,” she said.

Martin paused briefly to regard the plates. Despite my mother’s attempt to conceal the food, he saw it for exactly what it was.

“Go on now,” she added. “It’s already getting cold.”

We did as we were told and joined her at the table. By then, the food was indeed cold, which made it even harder to stomach. My mother ate quickly and kept her eyes on her plate. Both Mar
tin and I picked at our food, poking at it and moving it around on the plate rather than consuming it. I split each piece of fish into bits and tried to hide them under a crust of bread. Martin made no such effort. He corralled all of the fish into the center of his plate, then left it there, uneaten, in a display of protest.

“If you’re done, put your dishes in the sink,” my mother said.

Together, we all cleared and cleaned the dishes, then Martin took out the lamb book he’d borrowed from the library and began to read. My mother disappeared into her bedroom and shut the door, leaving me with nothing to do. I fiddled with a loose part of the hem on my skirt until I grew desperate enough to get out one of my textbooks and flip through it. I wasn’t reading. I just needed some way to occupy myself.

The evening dragged on in maddening silence. The air was churning with the unsaid. I could feel it roiling against my skin and raising the hair on my arms. When I couldn’t look at the textbook a second longer, I went and stood at the window. The cold pressed itself through the glass. Shadows floated in the windows across the alley. Silence could be worse than any slammed door or sudden outburst. Silence burned slowly, like the coal in the stove, and the longer it went on, the louder it got.

I sighed hard to break the quiet, to remind myself that silence wasn’t all there was, and my breath steamed the window, creating a blank page of glass. As it faded, I raised my finger and prepared to write my name. Then came a hard pounding on the door. Martin snapped up from his book.

“Don’t answer it,” Martin implored. “Wait for her.”

“But?”

He guessed what I was thinking, that my mother might be
sleeping and if there was another knock, she would blame us for letting it wake her.

“I’ll get it,” my mother said, appearing from the bedroom still fully dressed. She smoothed back her hair before she opened the door.

It was Leonard. He was sweaty and breathing hard, like he’d run to our apartment from someplace else. He blinked at my mother, fumbling for what to say. I wondered if he had expected me to answer the door and was thrown when he saw her instead.

He muttered something in Polish and glanced at me, almost apologetically, then dropped his eyes and waited for my mother to answer.

“Go home, Leonard,” she instructed softly.

He shuffled in place, debating what he should do next. He looked at me again, woefully. Leonard was scared.

“Go on,” my mother said.

Leonard took a step backward into the alley, eyes fixed on mine as the door swung closed, blotting him from view. My mother didn’t turn around right away. She seemed to be staring at the spot in the doorway where Leonard had stood. When she finally swiveled around, her expression was intent, as if she was reining in her thoughts and collecting herself.

“It’s time for bed. Go and change into your nightclothes.”

“But—” Martin began.

My mother flashed him a look warning him to mind her. He folded his book closed as commanded and dug his nightclothes out from under our pillow.

I was still standing by the window and I could see Leonard
outside. He was lingering on our stoop, confused, his head hanging low. After a minute, he lumbered off.

“You too,” my mother said. She ushered me away from the window with a flick of her head.

Martin and I brushed our teeth side by side at the sink in the washroom. Real toothpaste was expensive, so we used pure baking soda instead. The tart taste of the baking soda always lingered in our mouths no matter how much water we washed it down with.

“What’s going on?” Martin whispered, his mouth full.

“I don’t know. All I know is that I want this day to be over.”

“Me too,” he confessed with a glance back at the tub.

My mother was waiting for us when we got out of the washroom. “Now your prayers.”

“I think I’ve prayed enough for today,” Martin mumbled.

Each night we would kneel in front of the cot, hands together, and bow our heads in prayer. We rattled off our prayers in Polish. That was my mother’s rule, as though saying them in English would have dampened the meaning. Normally, I would stare at the ceiling as I recited them. Looking up always seemed more appropriate than looking down or closing my eyes. As I said my prayers that evening, my gaze drifted over to my mother. She was sitting at the table and had taken out the shirt she was fixing for my father, but she wasn’t sewing. The shirt lay in her lap, untouched, while her eyes remained locked on some unseen, skyward point. She appeared to be drinking in our prayers and letting them fill her.

Where are you?
I wanted to ask her.
Why aren’t you here?

My voice momentarily trailed off and Martin elbowed me to
keep going. We finished with a feeble, “Amen.” Martin waited for my mother to tell us to get up. When she didn’t, he turned around to find out why and caught her staring at the wall.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, hastily lifting the shirt from her lap to make it look as if she was sewing.

Martin inspected the wall, searching for whatever had held her attention.

“Go to sleep,” she told us. “It’s time for bed.”

She gave the coals in the stove a final poke, rousing what little heat she could, then shut off the lights and strode into the bedroom. The dying coals slumped and crackled in the stove as a dense darkness billowed in the room. I kept my eyes open until they could adjust. Soon the moonlight from the window was enough to see by. It cast a pale shaft of light into the room, showing me what I had not seen before. There was a mark on the wall, a faint yet perfectly square shadow where the painting of the Black Madonna had hung. With a jolt, I realized I had forgotten about the Black Madonna. How could I have, I wondered, given all I had already done to retrieve it? It was possible to forget things, no matter how necessary or important, even when they were right before your eyes. That was what had happened with the Black Madonna. And that was what had happened with my mother. We were her children, but we had faded into the far reaches of her peripheral vision, and nothing we did to clamor or claw our way back into her line of sight would work.

S
OMETIME LATER
, my mother padded out of her bedroom and into the washroom. She had sent us to bed so early that Martin and I were both still awake. We listened as she washed her face.

“Are you tired?” he whispered.

“Are you?”

“Kind of. But kind of not.”

“Do you want me to tell you about the dogs some more?”

I had been passing along all of the details I’d learned about Mr. Beresik’s dogs to Martin, weaving them into an ongoing tale. He liked to hear about their names and what color they were and how they were trained, although I spared him the stories of their fights. I never told him that was why Mr. Beresik kept them.

“Okay. I could hear about the dogs.”

The faucet in the washroom squealed to a stop and we waited for my mother to reappear. Instead the water came back on, this time in the bathtub.

“Do you think she’s taking a bath this late at night?”

“I guess so,” I said, but I hoped my mother was running the water in the bath to clean it and wipe away the scales left by the fish so Martin wouldn’t have to see them.

“That’s an awful lot of water,” Martin declared.

The minutes crept by and I began to get nervous. A horrible idea started slinking around my mind. A year earlier, the police had been called to Mrs. Koshchushko’s apartment. She had run a bath, submerged herself in the balmy water, and slit one of her wrists with a shaving razor. Her son found her and dragged her out of the tub, naked, wet, and half conscious. He tied a dishrag around her wrist, then went for help. She did not die, of course,
but she was left with the winding scar of the hasty stitches that a doctor had used to close her wrist. Martin did not know of the incident and I had only heard of it because I was in the bathroom at school when two girls were gossiping about it. I wasn’t sure if my parents knew or if people in town were aware either. With so many secrets in such a small place, it was no wonder that some fell through the cracks.

“Do you think she fell asleep in there?” Martin asked.

I pictured Mrs. Koshchushko drifting off in a pool of pinkish water, her soul draining out of her. I vaulted out of bed, startling Martin and hurling the covers to our feet.

“What are you doing? Don’t go in there,” he urged. My hand flew for the knob. I was about to turn it. “Don’t,” Martin pleaded.

I stopped myself, held my breath and pressed my ear to the door. A steady drip from the faucet was all I could make out.

“But what if—”

“What if what?”

I couldn’t tell him what I feared. Martin gathered up the blankets from where I had kicked them. “Come back to bed. She’ll be out soon.”

My feet carried me back to the cot and I climbed in over Martin.