Ghostbread

by Sonja Livingston

  Still, the psychologist nodded and talked about separation from family and how hard it could be, and I hung my head and tried to look sad, but the only sadness I could conjure was the memory of Steph’s pile in the front yard.

  To stop the blaze, the firemen had hosed out our upstairs, and the pile of gifts that Steph had saved all summer to buy slid out from under her bed through a blown-out window and landed with a slap on the front lawn.

  That she had a pile of gifts hidden under her bed, waiting to be given on Christmas day. That she’d raked yard after yard, shoveled driveway after driveway, to earn the money. That all those presents had become flat, wet piles melting into the earth, more ashes than gifts. That her face never crumpled over such things (even as I howled over the loss of a double-belt—the one I’d bought at Larry’s Bootery after raking only two lawns). Only these things made me sad.

  I thought of my strong sister, of her kindness, and her losses. And other than these things, I could think of nothing so bad about our house catching fire.

  But I said I missed Lamont Place anyway. Because it explained the door, and the man in front of me with the flat-lined smile was waiting for an answer. I looked at the floor while he leaned forward in his creaky chair, forced what he must have imagined to be a concerned look into his eyes, touched my shoulder, and let me go.

  79

  Liam and Maria were my friends. My elegant European friends. Liam, with a dark beard and a voice that smiled, and Maria, his high-talking, fashionable wife. They were friends I’d made on my own. Worldly friends, whose company made me forget the piles of dirty dishes and stacks of unpaid bills back at home. Maria, who had been a teacher in England, volunteered at the Corpus Christi School, where I twisted my legs into pretzels during lunch breaks, spun round in my plaid jumper, and talked to her as intelligently as possible about music and clothes. Soon, she and Liam began to take me out after Mass, to Durand Eastman Park, to their apartment, or the string of funky shops in another section of the city. I soaked up their company, visited as often as I could, flying away from my neighborhood on the white ten-speed Lisa had abandoned when she left for the army. And somehow, as I peddled my way to them, I was convinced that they found me as charming and sophisticated as I found them.

  80

  Alone in the dark room, I tried to remember what she’d said. My mother. Her mouth ran like the wildest of rivers, untamed and splashing, soaking whatever it touched, so that I spent much of my time trying to keep dry. After tonight’s Mass, I’d recognized her voice and followed it until I found her standing with Liam and Maria. My friends. She’d never even met them. Until that night. And now there she was, laughing, calling me over, but not before she’d leaned into them and whispered something, exposing them to the clumsy girl she saw in my approach. And I saw, as I walked closer, that their eyes had changed toward me. They saw me as she did. Awkward. A child. Their faces were moist with laughter, and I wondered what embarrassing thing my mother had told them.

  I remembered only their faces, their laughter, my turning and running from the church basement, rounding the corner, pushing past a strawberry-haired parishioner in a prairie dress, ringleted child clinging to the bottom of her quilted skirt. Both seemed suspended—their milky skin and red hair splashing in the air as I passed.

  I stepped into the vestry, ran through the musty corridor behind the altar, into the side sacristy, where I scrunched into a ball and fell into the large closet. I pushed one hand over my mouth to smother the rattle of my breath and another over my nose to block the smell of lemon oil, candle wax, and dust. When my breathing slowed and the fear of sneezing had passed, I looked at the open doors and decided them a liability. I leaned forward and tried closing them, but my arms were too short and I managed to pull only one door shut, while the other remained cracked enough to allow a soft shoot of light inside.

  The cupboard ran floor to ceiling, and was so old its wood was closer to black than brown. It took up an entire wall of the room and contained vestments used for Mass. The white robes of altar servers fell from hangers and brushed against my face as I folded myself deep into the cupboard.

  I didn’t want to be found. Not yet.

  I knew the place, but it hardly mattered. As an altar girl, I stood in this room and slipped white cotton robes over my head once or twice a weekend. The youth group met here sometimes, too, all of us crammed together to plan church dances and car washes. But it was different tonight. Cold and dark. Crowded. With more statues than usual.

  It was the night before Easter, and the statues removed from the pedestals on Good Friday lined the walls of the room, awaiting their return to the altar. Through the crack of the cupboard door, I eyeballed Joseph, the carpenter. Though I’d never found him especially worthy of devotion, hovering on his pastel-hued globe, face as powdered and pretty as a girl’s, he had never seemed unkind before either. But that night, he seemed put out, and downright nasty.

  The light filtering into the room grew duller, speckled and brown. The church was emptying now, only a few people remaining in their pews, bent at the knee, praying hard for Jesus’ return. Most people were down in the basement, clustered and milling, eating sweets and drinking thin coffee, swapping news, wishing each other a happy Easter.

  She was down there, too. My mother. Perhaps still talking with Liam and Maria. She had not yet come to find me, had probably not yet realized my flight.

  I don’t know how much time passed before I heard her call my name. The sound of her wanting me came in from the window near the parking lot and it was sweet, but I punished her by plugging my ears with my fists and curling deeper into the cupboard. Eventually her voice faded and someone said, “Don’t worry, Therese—she’s probably gone home by now.”

  After a series of good-byes and car doors slamming, I listened to the sound of drivers pulling away, one at a time.

  The brown light diminished as candles were extinguished out on the altar. I reached into the pocket of my pink corduroys and found the thin white taper and its tiny cardboard drip-tray taken from the vigil Mass. I had no way to light it, but was glad for its company as I moved from the cupboard toward the center of the room.

  I sat in a chair. One lined in velvet. A throne, really. The one Pontius Pilate sat on in the annual Passion Play, the one my brother Anthony was brought before in those years when he’d played Jesus. My legs dangled from the chair and I noticed the doll-sized plaster Christ child lying at one of its ornate feet, swaddled by a blanket of pale blue paint. A crack ran alongside his pink-cheeked plaster face and I looked away, to the statue of the black saint, tiny bird held in his dark hands. St. Martin de Porres. I remembered his name from school, then moved my eyes from his peeling skin to the life-sized crucifix resting against the wall. Jesus was on it, suffering. This was the crucifix used on Good Friday, the same bloodied feet lines of old ladies bent to kiss. Dusty boxes filled with blue glass candles lined the wall and waited to be placed as offerings beneath Mary. I caressed the candle in my pocket and longed for the sight of the sweet-faced Virgin. But she was still in the church. Covered with cloth as she mourned for her child. Out in the church with no one for company but the bone-dry gospel writers.

  The house on the dead end had been repaired, and we were all together again. I was in the sixth grade. I still enjoyed my favorite things, school and time with Stephanie. I read and she dragged me out for bike rides and street hockey. But ever since my return from Kara’s house, I felt different. I had found a pimple on my face at Kara’s and when I asked her what it was, she had laughed. “Someone’s becoming a teenager,” she’d said.

  I wasn’t sure what I was becoming; I only knew that since my return to Lamont Place, I had less patience for the empty refrigerator, and a tougher time laughing off my mother’s moods. Things were changing, and there were times I felt myself completely boxed in. Times I wanted to let loose.

  I’d run before. Something my mother said or did would settle inside me until every part of my body de
manded flight. So I’d run. And run. Until I got tired, or hungry, or scared. I’d run in circles usually, careful not to stray too far. I wanted escape, but not so perfect an escape I’d be deprived of the worry on her face. I didn’t want to miss the sound of her voice as she called my name.

  The last time I ran, I convinced myself I’d be gone forever and so took a box of fund-raising chocolate with me as provisions. “I’ll be gone for weeks,” I thought, “I may need these thin mints for survival.” Hopping the bent wire fence that separated our yard from the back lot, I leaned my body against the cinder-block wall of an old warehouse and considered my options. I thought about heading north, toward Lake Ontario, maybe even on into Canada. Until I remembered suddenly that dead cats were often found in this lot when the snow melted each spring. Soft and sinking, their gray bodies became part of the mud. Too afraid to trudge forward, I considered crying, but instead peeled the gold foil away from a caramel-filled chocolate and popped it into my mouth. Then another. The candy had been intended to help raise money for school. Chocolate sales were as important to the survival of Catholic schools as Bingo. But as I stood waiting for the sound of my mother’s searching, I unwrapped bar after bar of the smooth milk chocolate and set it into my mouth. Only when the sky began to darken and the air started to chill did I hear her voice, and by then, I’d eaten through the entire box of candy.

  As soon as I heard her call, I rehopped the fence, nothing remaining in my fund-raising box but balled-up foil. My mother could have rightly punished me for gorging on chocolate we couldn’t afford to replace—or at least shamed me later with a regular retelling of the tale—but she did neither. She only shook her head, quietly handed over a wad of crumpled bills, and never made mention of them again.

  A sound outside stopped my thoughts. She was there again, I realized. In the parking lot. She must have asked someone for a ride and come back to the church. It was completely dark in the room when I heard her calling my name. My heart leapt, and I was halfway to shouting when pride cemented me. I listened to her calling—all laughter evaporated from her voice as she wandered the edge of the parking lot, sifting through shrub and weed, saying my name over and over, separated by only a panel of stained glass.

  I bit my lip until her voice trailed off and I heard the car pull away. Then, before I even had time to indulge my regret, I heard something, the scraping of metal. From inside the church. I fell to the floor near a log of rolled carpet and squeezed my eyes shut. The sound continued and just then, I remembered that bats were known to roost in that room. I conjured up images of wings stuck in my hair until I deciphered the sound—the jingle of keys. Someone was locking up the church. Locking this room. I hugged the roll of carpet, but, for some reason, did not cry out.

  Instead I sobbed. I hated myself and the room with all its broken statues, their stiff and hungry waiting. Only the moon showed mercy, and with its help I found the opening of the rolled carpet, slipped into its mouth, and slept.

  I woke to the sound of sweeping. It was dark still, but kinder, with daylight playing at its edges. I climbed out of the carpet and crept to the door where I spied Jane through the glass; the old sacristan was preparing the church for morning Mass. Easter morning, I remembered, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back home with my family. Jane, with her worn face and threadbare sweater, had finished sweeping and was wiping the chalices on the altar, removing the previous night’s smudges. I considered knocking, but decided against it, certain that a woman who genuflected each time she passed the tabernacle (even—as I saw then—when no one was watching), and had dedicated her life to keeping the place sacred, would not have taken kindly to my invasion of it.

  I waited.

  The minutes were cut with sharp nervous energy, but I waited. Until the clinking of keys finally came near, then disappeared back into the church. When enough time had passed, I tried the door.

  It opened.

  I looked out into the church.

  Mary was draped in blue and glowed in the early light—even the gospel writers lining the altar looked somehow softer now. So I stepped from the room and sprinted behind pews to the set of heavy wooden doors, where I stumbled into the morning.

  I ran.

  Only this time, I was headed home.

  Past the castlelike armory on Main Street, where kids played dodge-ball among the tanks because the school had no gym. Over the railroad bridge, onto Goodman Street, where houses and restaurants and storefronts were locked and sleeping. Through the unusually quiet streets of my neighborhood, slowing only as I neared our dead end. I walked into our yard and headed toward the back entrance, hoping to sneak in unnoticed, praying my mother was sleeping and had somehow forgotten the night before. Her actions were unpredictable lately; I never knew if I’d come home to an erupting volcano, or a cloud of safety. Rounding the last corner, I held my breath.

  She was there.

  On the steps of the back porch. Staring into the yard. Following her gaze, I noticed the green tips of tulips planted last fall just starting to push at the earth. Near her feet, a mound of rusted frill had begun to uncurl into what would become a bleeding heart; its arching stalks would soon hang heavy with crimson purses.

  She turned and caught sight of me.

  “There you are,” she said, and turned away.

  “Can I still have my Easter basket?” came my greedy response, the only words I could manage.

  She nodded and I saw that she was glad I was home.

  Like our neighborhood, my mother was unusually quiet. She just sat and looked out over the small yard. And in that silence, I saw her.

  I noticed that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to the vigil Mass. I thought of the short-legged polyester pants and her graying hair, and how often they’d embarrassed me—including the night before, as I saw her there, standing with my friends. Looking at her gazing out over our yard, I knew suddenly that it was not only what she said or wore that I feared Liam and Maria might have seen, but who she was—who we were—and for the first time, I imagined a night other than my own.

  I sat down next to her and though we did not touch, we were close. Neither of us spoke. Instead, we sat on the rackety old porch and watched as the sun painted itself pink across the sky.

  81

  They came to me from TV and books and neighborhood health clinics. Cher, Wonder Woman, a pantheon of Greek goddesses. Poor Persephone’s mother, the loving Demeter, seemed especially well suited. All were strong, all were capable, and all just a thought away from caring for me. Though I had a mother of my own, whose life I circled round like a planet to the sun, I was always on the lookout for another.

  I looked for mothers the way other kids collected postage stamps.

  I reached for mothers the way I reached for communion at Mass, hand extended, eyes to heaven.

  I craved mothers like I craved bread.

  And every so often, I’d get lucky and find one. At school, on a field trip to the planetarium, the art gallery, through the window of a car passing through our neighborhood. I’d see her, push my hair behind my ear, straighten my back, look hard in her direction.

  I’d been stockpiling mothers for years, and except for Mrs. Dowling—the second-grade teacher who painted her lips a dusty shade of pumpkin and preferred showing filmstrips to reading books aloud in class—except for her, who had no magic and would not do, I had transformed every schoolteacher I’d ever had into a mother at one time or another.

  I stared into the black of chalkboards while they talked on about sounding out vowels and the Revolutionary War, imagining my room in their houses, the pink ruffled canopy bed, the chest of dolls, closets full of dresses. Once I began to attend Catholic schools, I discovered that even nuns had their appeal.

  When Sister Claire read poems by Langston Hughes and Sonia Sanchez and complimented my ability to diagram sentences, I found that my mother fantasies were entirely flexible. Giving up the idea of a frilly bedroom, I imagined a less furnis
hed, but equally satisfying life at the Motherhouse, surrounded by all those plain and purposeful women, their tight clean rooms, their well-worn books. I imagined my hair cut short, the feel of my feet in Birkenstock sandals, and began to wonder how old you had to be to join up.

  Mother collecting.

  It’s how I passed the time.

  But as I grew and changed, so did my need.

  By the time I was done with grammar school, teachers and goddesses still had appeal—but I needed something more. Someone real. An ear to spill my secrets into. A voice that answered back.

  I wanted someone who spoke in calm tones. Someone with a phone extension, a full purse, and car keys. Someone who’d gone to college, who had studied anything ending in “-ology.” Someone with done-up hair and belted dresses, who shaped her brows and applied lipstick. Someone who walked tall, wore heels, went places.

  Someone who might take me with her.

  82

  Annette Bellaqua talked with her hands. The curls on her head shook whenever she argued or swore, and so the dark ringlets were in perpetual motion. She wore wire-framed glasses and came from New York City with her husband, Sal, who was on staff at Corpus Christi Church.

  Unlike the women I’d previously selected as mother material, there was no sweetness, no saintly indulgence about Annette. She was smart and though barely twenty, had already finished college.

  She took me to her place, cooked for me, went on and on in her down-state voice about the superiority of her marinara. Annette talked passionately about the Greeks, and took me to the Village Green bookshop for paperbacks, Japanese postcards, half-moon cookies.

  She taught Latin to kids nearly her own age at the local Catholic boys’ school and though she had a large and solid heart, she was barbed wire on the surface. She snapped her gum and if any wise-ass comment was to be made, it came from her. She certainly didn’t put up with sarcasm from me and, in truth, Annette was so busy spilling forth run-on sentences on the topics of religion, politics, and feminism, there was simply no room to get mouthy in her company.