The Guineveres (9 page)

I should have told Dad, but I never said a word. I don't know why. I wanted to, but I couldn't get the words out when I tried. I thought maybe I could leave him an anonymous note, or call the house from a pay phone down the street and disguise my voice, or simply will the information to him through concentrated thought like Dorothy does when she says “There's no place like home.” But I couldn't. I didn't. It's all my fault, and I still feel guilty about it.

A few weeks later, as my mom was making breakfast for my brother and me, measuring out pancake batter and pouring it onto the griddle with a sizzle, she mentioned to us she might be home a little late again that night.

“Craft class?” I asked, staring at my half-eaten stack of pancakes drowning in syrup that made swirly shapes at the edges.

“Craft class,” she said, licking her finger.

“Maybe I can take an art class at the YMCA,” I said. I wanted to be an artist, just like Dad, even though I wasn't sure if I had the talent. Sometimes the way I saw things in my head didn't match up to how I put them down on paper when I'd sketch in my notebook. That's the way it is with me. I have all these feelings and it's hard to get them out right. It's difficult to say exactly what I mean. Sometimes I just
feel
what I mean. But you can't paint a feeling, can you?

“Maybe,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

“We'll talk about it after school.”

But after school everything had changed. I knew this as soon as my bus turned the corner to my street. I saw a blur of reds and blues and whites, lights coming from the tops of cars parked in my driveway. When the bus came to a stop, I leaped down, my feet not touching a single step. Dad stood off to one side, whispering with a police officer. His hands were cuffed in front of him. His head hung low like his neck was a hinge.

“Where's Mom?” I asked. Dad wouldn't look up at me, and another police officer came up behind me and pulled me down the driveway and into the back of his car.

“Just sit here, sweetie,” he said to me. “What's your name?”

“Guinevere,” I said. “Where's my mom?”

“Just stay put right here.” He shut the car door. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

Soon some paramedics rolled out a stretcher. A man was covered with a sheet to his neck. I saw his mustache, those twin peaks of hair, and I knew I'd seen this man before. He was Danny. He'd cleaned Mom's gutters, and I didn't tell Dad about it.

“Let me out,” I started to yell, pawing at the window with the meat of my palms. The police officer turned and walked toward me, but behind him I could see another stretcher being led from the house, this one completely covered with a sheet that looked like one of Dad's drop cloths, all red dappled. I knew it was Mom. Knew it because I could see her light blue housecoat sticking out from under the sheet, dragging on the ground as they rolled the stretcher that sounded like roller skate wheels against the concrete.

The police led Dad to the back of their cruiser. “I'm sorry,” he mouthed. He was looking at me now, behind the glass of the police car, my forehead pressed against the window. He brought his cuffed hands to his face in fists, and I noticed they were stained, from paint or from blood. Maybe both. It didn't matter. The officer ducked Dad's head inside the door, then shut it behind him.
I'm sorry, too,
I wanted to tell him.
I'm sorry, too.
Dad sat face forward, motionless, as still as he'd told me to sit while he was painting my portrait in the garage.

My brother and I stayed at our aunt's house that night. My aunt said people are either born good or born bad, and that Dad was a bad seed just waiting to burst. My brother and I didn't speak. Dad never came home. Mom's funeral—I don't want to talk about it. I'd rather paint a picture of it someday that shows how I still loved my dad, how I loved my mom, too, how I felt responsible and sick and sad and lonely and afraid, like I was a blend of paints, all the colors at once, that ended up a putrid shade of brown.

Not long after the funeral, my aunt took us to see Dad in jail; she waited in the car while my brother and I went inside, emptying our pockets to show we didn't have anything in them. We sat uncomfortably quiet for a while in the cafeteria, then talked about school and the weather. There were other inmates there; other families, too. We didn't have much to talk about, really. What was there to say? Words can't do anything at times like those anyway, other than fill your ears with noise. When we were getting ready to leave, I asked him if he had been painting, drawing at the very least. I remember his eyes. They looked like wet pennies, gleaming with sadness so heavy that I could feel it in my chest.

“I've lost my inspiration, sweetheart,” he said.

“Maybe you'll find it again,” I said.

Dad paused, then took my hand in his and squeezed it. “Maybe,” he said.

A few days later, my aunt told me that I'd be going somewhere to stay for a while. She said my brother would be going somewhere, too, but I later learned he stayed with her so he could finish off his last year of high school. After that, I'm sure he moved far away, but I haven't spoken to him since. I guess he didn't want to be reminded of his old life and all that—maybe that's why he didn't write—and what else would I do but remind him?

My aunt and I drove in silence, not talking, except when she kept bringing up stories about when I was a baby. When I was a baby I used to cry all through the night, and the only thing that would console me was when someone walked me up and down our front porch, bouncing me in their arms. “You liked to be under the stars,” my aunt said, but I didn't remember that.

My aunt slowed the car down as we eased past this church, and she craned her neck, squinting to see something. Then we pulled down a steep drive, lined by a fence on either side. I saw the stone building ahead, big as a castle and almost as pretty, except it was kind of scary because there were lots of windows, and the blinds were all closed like they were hiding something inside. This was what I imagined divinity school to look like.

In a way, I guess it was a divinity school.

Our galoshes squished on the marble foyer as we entered, a loud squeak each time I took a step, so I tried to stand still. “My name is Sister Frances Nazarene,” said the woman who stood there to greet us. She was the palest person I'd ever seen, and at first I thought she might have been a ghost. She held out her arms as though an invisible bundle of logs rested there. “But you may call me Sister Fran.” I turned toward my aunt, but I knew. I knew. She kissed me. She left. I didn't say a word to her, not even good-bye. I didn't ask her about my brother. I didn't ask her if she'd come back for me. I already knew the answer.

“The joy of God is the innocent,” Sister Fran said, turning to me once the door was shut. She opened a vial of oil, and she dabbed me on the forehead, drawing a cross with her thumb. I began to hyperventilate, the first asthma attack I'd ever had, and it left me feeling dizzy.

Sister Fran flexed her cheeks into a smile. “There, there,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “God has plans for you.” She removed her hand and walked to a side closet, from which she produced a mop and a bucket. She pointed to the marble floor, smeared muddy with footprints from my galoshes. “And his first plan is for you to clean your mess,” she said, tsking and handing me the mop. I took it, and as my hand touched the handle, I thought of Dad's old painting, the man with the grimaced face, the barrels hanging overhead. At that moment, I opened my mouth to protest, but I stopped myself. Something clicked—not audible, but inside me. I thought of his face, twisted and angular, his tongue, red like a tiny fire in his mouth. The mop felt heavy in my hands, not like a mop at all. Like the weight of the world.

 

Sacrifice

The first week of October, just before a supper of baked cauliflower and boiled potatoes—we remembered the meal was all white, the color of purity—Sister Fran blew her whistle to call everyone in the cafeteria to attention. We had not yet said Grace, so every girl instinctively drew her hands into prayer and, unhinging her neck, bowed her head in repose. But Sister Fran trilled her whistle again. “We shall say our blessing in a moment, girls. First, an announcement.” We raised our heads. Sister Fran paced the length of the serving table, where steam rose from food in curlicues that seemed to be spelling something in cursive. A message from God, we thought as we recounted this moment later in the Bunk Room. Sister Fran hesitated, then covered her mouth with her hand like a flesh-colored beard.

“A group of young men, soldiers, will be arriving here shortly to recover in the convalescent wing,” she said. “They've been injured in the War.” She walked down the aisle of tables now, past The Sads whose spines bent like C's, so that Sister Fran tapped their backs to tell them to straighten up into a proper posture. “All of us at the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration have been called to be part of the War Effort,” she said. She continued walking, marching, rather, as though this discussion of the War had altered her stride, militarized it. She finally came to a halt in front of The Guineveres' table. We pulled back our shoulders and stiffened our abdomens. “This means all of us,” she said. She swiveled and marched again toward the serving buffet.

Remember, we were only young girls then, and the War, so far away, didn't seem to concern us. Gwen's dad had once fought in a war, but she didn't know much about it except that a picture of him in his army uniform hung on the wall of their living room. And now when Sister Fran uttered the word “war,” only three letters long but with a heft that echoed off the high ceilings of the cafeteria, the same way it did when she said the word “God,” we were still relatively impassive. Instead, we wondered who these young men might be. Gwen kicked us under the table, hardly able to contain her smile that threatened to flip inside out and swallow her face entirely.

“Soldiers,” she mouthed. The tips of her ears burned red with excitement.

They arrived late the next afternoon. The Guineveres sat on break in the courtyard, chilly in our thin gray sweaters. Ebbie Beaumont hugged her knees in her usual spot across the way from us, but instead of gazing up toward the sky, all of us watched the bus pull up behind the gate. We would have mistaken it for a school bus, except it was white and had a faded red cross etched on its side, paint peeling away like pencil shavings. Three sober-faced men hopped out. They wore beige uniforms, and Sisters Connie and Magda scurried out from the convent to unlock the gate for them. The five of them spoke in low tones, in a series of nods and hand gestures. One of the men handed Sister Connie a crumpled stack of papers, and she pointed toward the door that led to the Sick Ward. When they opened the back of the bus and pulled the first young boy out on a stretcher, both Sister Connie and Sister Magda lowered their heads and motioned the sign of the cross. Ebbie looked at us and shrugged her shoulders. We shrugged ours back. One by one the soldiers were carried inside.

These were not strapping soldiers in crisp metal-pinned suits or in field camouflage, as we immediately imagined when Sister Fran first mentioned them, not the clean-cut boys we'd dreamed of as we drifted off to sleep. Instead, they were the kind who had fought in battles, who had suffered injuries so severe they were in comas. They were the kind with body parts wrapped in gauze or in plaster. The kind whose wounds were so deep you could smell it on them, even outside in the courtyard, a dusty metallic scent that made us take such short breaths we felt woozy.

“Ebbie,” Sister Connie called, motioning her toward the entrance to the Sick Ward. Ebbie stood, wiped the back of her skirt, took in one last dose of the sky. Then she joined Sister Connie, who put her arm around the girl and whispered something, though we couldn't hear what.

Even though our break had gone long, The Guineveres didn't move from our benches in the courtyard. Ginny pulled at her socks, and Win picked up a handful of gravel, flicking the pieces one by one onto the path below. When two of the men carried the last soldier inside, the third reached into the back of the bus and pulled out five duffel bags, olive drab and shaped like sausages.

“My dad had one like that,” Gwen said, so we knew they were government issued. The outsides of each were marked in chalky white, a long series of numbers separated by dashes. The man dropped them on the ground in front of him, heedless of breakable contents, and dust kicked up like smoke. He looked at his watch, then around for the other officers, but they had disappeared inside, so he sat on the edge of the bumper drawing circles in the dirt.

“We can help you, sir,” Gwen hollered from our bench. The uniformed man stood at attention, looking surprised, as though he hadn't even noticed us. As though the female form had startled him. He checked his watch again, tapped his foot anxiously, then nodded. We followed Gwen to the courtyard's gate, the one that usually remained locked, a threshold to another world.

Up close, we could see the officer's deep-rutted scar that lined the side of his face, from his neck to his chin. It was raised and red, shaped like a hook, like a crooked finger pointing toward his nose. He angled his face away from us, and we tried not to stare. The Guineveres were not impolite.

“Thank you for your service,” Gwen said. She stood square in front of him, one hand resting on her hip.

The rest of us echoed her sentiments. “Yes, thank you,” we said, despite the fact that we wanted to ask him about his scar, how he got it, or if it hurt. His posture was that of a telephone pole, and for a moment we thought he was going to salute us. Instead, he tugged at the brim of his hat the way a cowboy might.

“Uniforms. Personal effects,” he said, gesturing toward the canvas duffels at his feet. Perhaps military men didn't speak in full sentences, or perhaps we made him nervous. Either way, we took his gesture as acceptance of our help. We each picked up a bag. They weren't particularly heavy. Win, the strongest of us, carried two, one slung over each shoulder, and from behind, as we walked back to the Sick Ward, it looked like she had sprouted a set of tubular wings.