The Patron Saint of Liars (40 page)

"Tell me," Sister Evangeline said.

"We can't talk about this." My mother raised her voice ever so slightly. It would have been enough to send me running home, but Sister Evangeline didn't even blink.

"Girls," Sister said. "Why don't you go outside for a while?"

I looked at Lorraine, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and put down her knife. "What is this?" I said.

"Just go," my mother said to us.

"I want to know what's going on," I said.

And just that quick my mother turned on me. "You can't know everything! Goddamnit, Cecilia. You don't get to know everything about everyone."

I stared at her. I could feel a wave of tears coming up and I bit down hard on my back teeth to keep them in. "I was just asking you a question," I said. "I just wanted—"

"Go on, honey," Sister Evangeline said. "Let your mother and I talk for a minute. This isn't anything. You and Lorraine give us a few minutes. We'll finish dinner. By the time it's on the table everything will be fine, okay?"

I nodded. I didn't know what to say anymore. Lorraine and I walked out like ghosts, into a day that was still too bright.

"What was that all about?"

"Did it look like I had any idea what that was about?"

"I've said it before," she said, walking through the pasture toward my house, staying on the goat trail I seemed to go on a hundred times a day. "Your mother has a past. She has secrets."

I was about ready to kill Lorraine.

We watched "Jeopardy" and the early news and waited for six o'clock to come. I tried to see it in my mind. The girls would be drinking that lousy tea now. My mother would be setting the tables alone because Lorraine and I were here. She would be putting the dressing on the salad, slicing the chicken, putting out pitchers of water and milk. The same silver pitchers they'd used when it was a hotel. Everything would be ready and it would all be exactly the same. We would serve dinner. We would eat together in the kitchen, Sister Evangeline, my mother and father, me. Lorraine ate with the girls. Mother Corinne didn't like her to eat with us. Normally I wouldn't care, but tonight I was glad. I wanted to hold my family in place. I wanted to watch them.

And when sports was over and we went back, it was all exactly like that, except it wasn't. Something had happened while we were gone, something that my mother knew and Sister Evangeline knew, but the rest of us were kept from. My father didn't notice. He ate his chicken happily. He pushed his potatoes against his fork with his knife and chewed.

"I'm thinking I'm going to take all the shutters off and strip them. All of them. I may take them up to Owensboro and have them sandblasted. Some of the girls have been saying the shutters are flapping around at night, keeping them up. It seems like it would be better to get them all painted and rehung before I think about nailing them down."

My mother didn't eat her dinner. She moved it around on her plate, from left to right and then back again. It was like she couldn't eat it until she had turned it into a configuration she could stand. "You got a letter today," she said, out of the blue.

"From Sylvia," I said.

"Really," Dad said. "How's she doing?"

"I didn't finish it. I forgot. There was so much going on this afternoon."

"What was going on?" my father said.

"I don't know. What was going on, Mom?"

She wouldn't look at me. "Nothing," she said.

Whatever it was, it had Sister Evangeline upset. She was the one who did most of the talking at dinner and tonight she was quiet. She kept her eyes down. I thought that her color looked bad. The bandage was back on her hand again and it seemed like she was falling apart. It was one of the days she looked as old as she was.

After dinner my father and I started the dishes, but my mother told us both to go. "I'm in the mood to do dishes," she said.

Dad wiped his hands on a towel hanging over the stove. "I guess that's it for us then," he said.

"I'm going to stay awhile," I told him.

He nodded. "Suit yourself." Then he smiled at my mother. "The chicken was good," he said. He headed out the door and she did nothing to stop him. She didn't go and put her arms around his waist. She didn't kiss him. Not that she ever did those things but for some reason I kept expecting her to.

"You never do go," my mother said to me. She didn't sound mad, only tired. "I remember when you were little, you were always afraid you were going to fall asleep and miss something. I used to say, Cecilia, nobody can stay awake all the time and you'd say, I do. I think it was years before you ever believed that you really fell asleep. You thought you were awake all the time."

"I don't remember that," I said.

"Do some dishes," my mother said. There were girls coming into the kitchen, carrying stacks of plates. The ones who were really pregnant, the class of July, stayed in the dining room. Once you were that big you didn't have to do things like bring your plate to the kitchen anymore. Lorraine talked about that a lot. It was something she was looking forward to.

Lorraine brought her plate in and stayed to help dry. She was wondering too. She didn't want to be too far from the action. But after a while my mother sent her off. "Go on, Lorraine," my mother said. "You've done enough."

"I don't mind staying," she said.

"There's no point." She raised up her hands like she was presenting the kitchen, introducing it to us. "It's all been done."

Lorraine left grudgingly, and then my mother turned to me. "Bedtime," she said.

"It isn't even dark outside."

"My bedtime," she said. "I'm tired." My mother usually went to bed pretty soon after dinner because she got up so early in the morning, but seven-thirty was pushing it even for her. Sister Evangeline sat quietly, running her rosary around in her hands. She didn't say anything, not even good night.

I should have told her I wanted to stay. I did want to stay, but I went on home like she told me to. I said good night and went home. I told my father that I wanted to read, but all night I sat up and waited for the light to go on in my mother's window. It didn't.

Hindsight is a remarkable thing. When I look back on that night I tell myself I knew she was going, but I don't know that I knew anything, really. I didn't see the lights of the blue Dodge as she pulled it out of the little shed my father had built for it when I was still a baby. I didn't see them turn onto the road or which way they went. The only thing I knew for sure was that when I got up the next morning, my mother was gone.

5

I
WANTED TO LOOK
for her, but where do you look for someone in the world? It's such a huge place, and I thought of all of it. Interstates and highways, four lanes down to two. Rural routes and back roads and streets and alleys. There were so many places to drive. So many places to get out of the car and go inside. Every city and town, every field. Every house in each of those cities and all the rooms in those houses. My mother could be in any one of them. She was lost, like a ring you swore you'd never take off but did, put it in your pocket, and the next thing you knew it was gone. The places to begin looking are as many as the breaths you took in a day. More than that. She could be anywhere, and by the time I got there, she could be someplace else again.

I called the police. They asked me, were there any signs of a struggle?

No.

Any indications of foul play?

No.

Had she been depressed lately, moody? Was there any reason to think she might be leaving?

She was my mother. There were always signs she might leave.

Was there a note?

Yes. Two actually. The first was more of a list.

July 3d. Breakfast: Oatmeal, toast, strawberries (use the ones we have, they're getting soft). Lunch: Chicken salad with al
monds and white grapes (in blue Tupperware, bottom shelf), carrot and celery sticks, black olives, sponge cake. Dinner: Catfish (broil it), red new potatoes with parsley, steamed spinach, cornbread, tapioca pudding.

July 4th. Breakfast: Banana walnut waffles. Be sure to put out cold cereal too.

It goes on, a full two weeks, complete with assignments of who should do the cooking. It's pretty long. You don't need to read all of it. There was a lot on the Fourth of July. She wanted there to be fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans, apple pie. The stuff she always made on the Fourth.

The other note was to us, everyone together, her husband and daughter, Sister Evangeline, all of Saint Elizabeth's. All on one note.

Everyone,

I am sorry that I am leaving so suddenly, without saying good-bye. I'm doing a bad job with this and at the same time don't know another way to do it. I won't hope that you'll forgive me, or even that you'll understand. I only hope that you will find it in your hearts to wish me well and love me as I love all of you.

Rose

Not to sound bitter or anything, but part of it isn't true. The part about her loving everyone. She just didn't.

The police took this down, but they told me there was nothing they could do. I could hire a private investigator to find out where she was, but they couldn't make her come back. Unless the car wasn't in her name. We could track her down for that, they said.

But of course, the car was hers.

My father sat on the front porch of our house, his hands folded between his knees, and watched. Maybe it was for her to come back but maybe he was just watching in general.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," he said.

It had only been a day, not even twenty-four hours, but it seemed pretty goddamn clear that hope was not in order. "What do you think?" I said, and he must have thought I said, what are you thinking? What I meant was something else entirely.

"I was thinking about this girl I used to know when I was growing up and how she was in an accident and died. It was terrible, you know? The worst thing that could have happened." He kept on watching the field, at least the piece of the field that was right in front of him. "The whole town had their hearts broken. Everybody loved this girl. We all thought we'd never get over it. But we did, because she was dead." He stopped, as if he was trying very hard to figure out the point of all this. "Your mother's not dead," he said to me finally.

With all my heart I wished I could have comforted him. I wished I could have put my arm around his shoulder or sat on his knee and told him that we'd get through this. I wished I even could have lied to him and said I thought she'd come back. But I didn't do anything. I just stood there until I couldn't stand there anymore. Then I went down the steps and across the field without saying a word.

It was getting to be dinnertime. Someone would be putting together the meal she'd mapped out. I hadn't eaten all day. When my father came back from breakfast and woke me up to tell me about the notes, I lost my appetite. I wasn't looking forward to going to the old hotel, for all the obvious reasons: I didn't want to be reminded. I didn't want sympathy. I didn't want to hope that she would suddenly be there the way people are in movies. But I'd put enough together to know that Sister Evangeline was the person I needed to talk to. Dad said he hadn't seen her, that she was spending the day in her room. So I went down the hall and knocked on her door.

"Sister?" I said. "It's Cecilia."

It was quiet and I thought she might be sleeping, but then a voice came from the other side of the door, telling me to come in. She was sitting up in bed, fully dressed, her legs straight out in front of her. It was the room I used to take naps in when I was little. My mother would put me there while she cooked because it was so close to the kitchen. "You already know everything," she said.

"I know she's gone."

She looked like a doll, propped up in bed. She looked like someone had left her that way and she had no choice but to stay there. "I begged her not to go. I told her it was the wrong thing to do, but you know your mother. She has a mind of her own about things. You can't tell her anything."

"How could you not have told me?" I said, knowing perfectly well how. It was my mother she loved first. It was my mother whose confidence she would never break.

She looked at me, as sad as my father. "How could I have told? You make a promise to someone, you have to keep it. Nobody could have made her stay, pet. Not once she'd made up her mind."

But I believed I could have. Me, who never talked to my mother outside of a car, who she never came to for anything. I really thought that I could have made the difference. "Why did she go?"

Sister Evangeline sighed. "Your mother's a good woman. No one ever brought me the joy that she did. But everything with your mother was a secret. I used to tell her, if you tell another living being, you won't have that weight to walk around with all the time. It'll be easier. But she thought her life was a house of cards, you know, you take one card out and the whole thing comes down. She didn't tell me. There were things I knew, just from knowing. I knew she didn't like to think of everything she'd put behind her. If you get everything wrapped up just right and you leave it alone for a long time, then one day a little piece of it breaks off and comes back to you, it's seeing the dead. I think your mother thought she'd seen the dead, and it scared her bad."

"What dead?" I said. "What are we talking about here?"

"I don't know the details," she said. "I just have feelings."

I was so angry just then. Angry at Sister and my father, but so blindingly angry at my mother that I couldn't stand it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream at her for leaving me but she was gone.