“Felix? What am I going to do about the dreams?” I was dead tired from not getting any sleep, and totally scared of them coming back.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Pray?”
7
It was Friday night and Grandma Alice had lit the candles and said the Sabbath prayers, so I thought maybe that would do. But I still thought about the dreams all the way through dinner, scared to death I was going to have them again. Finally, Grandma Alice patted my hand and said, “Angie? Honey? You look like you don’t feel so good.”
“I don’t.”
“In the stomach? Or up here?” She pointed at her forehead.
“It’s kind of hard to tell,” I said. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”
“What about, kiddo?” Ben looked worried too, now.
“About war, sort of.” I didn’t say which war. I didn’t want them to think I was as crazy as Felix. “And it’s not because I’ve been hanging out with Jesse,” I added before Ben could open his mouth.
“No, wars just do that,” Grandma Alice said. “They get in the air. I remember when Ben’s father was overseas, during the war.”
I knew she meant World War II.
“I was a hostess at the Hollywood Canteen,” she continued. Grandma Alice’s father ran a movie studio; she was a Hollywood princess when she was young. “We’d serve coffee and dance with the boys who were home on leave. It made me feel like I was doing something to help keep my husband safe. Some kind of sympathetic magic—I danced with those lonesome boys here, and somebody would be nice to him over there.”
“Did you dream about the stuff they told you?”
“They never talked about the war, really. They just wanted to be normal for a few days. But yes, I dreamed. My head made things up. All David’s letters home to me were censored, of course. They weren’t allowed to write about troop movements or anything that might give the enemy information. So we pretended we were discussing movie plots when he wanted to tell me where they were shipping him.”
“You never told me any of this, Mom,” Ben said.
“Well, it didn’t come up,” Grandma Alice said lightly. “I was just glad when your brothers got through Vietnam without getting drafted. You, I didn’t have to worry about; you were too young.”
“Now we have nice new wars.” Ben sighed and speared a lamb chop.
“There was another demonstration downtown,” I said. I’d passed it on the way home from St. Thomas’s. “There were a lot of people holding candles and signs, and they were selling bumper stickers that said WHEN JESUS SAID LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, I THINK HE MEANT DON’T KILL THEM.”
Ben smiled. “Your mom wanted me to go stand with them. She can’t, because the school board will get on her case, so she wanted me to take a stand for the family’s political convictions. I mentioned that she seemed to have forgotten she’s left me.”
That almost made me laugh, it sounded so like Mom. When I got ready for bed I thought about what Felix had said, about praying. Please God, I thought, just let me have my own dreams. I don’t know whether God really listens to individual people or not. If he does, he must have a thousand ears. And I would think the people getting blown up in Afghanistan and murdered in Africa would drown out people like me. Just in case he was listening, though, I said, Please make Mom come home. Please get her back together with Ben.
How can he keep things straight, all the things people are asking him? What does he do when two people ask for opposite things? And what about all the people who keep saying God is on their side? How can he be on both sides? And how could he be on anybody’s side who wants to blow somebody else up in his name?
Even the churches can’t decide that one. There’s a big sign outside the Baptist church that says SUPPORT OUR TROOPS and one outside the Unitarian church that says PEACE VIGIL 7 P.M.
At the peace demonstration there was a car with a bumper sticker that said:
DYSLEXICS, REMEMBER THAT DOG LOVES YOU.
A MESSAGE FROM THE UNTIED CHURCH OF DOG.
Maybe God really is a dog, and he loves everybody but he can’t help them do things or get things or win the lottery, or wars. That probably isn’t an idea I should talk over with Father Weatherford. With Wuffie or Grandma Alice, maybe. Sometimes I think those two old ladies know stuff nobody else does. Grandma Alice had a cousin who died in the Holocaust. The family tried to get her out but it was too late. Grandma Alice doesn’t talk about it much. If she still believes in God, I guess he must be out there somewhere.
I went to sleep thinking about God, and Felix’s dreams stayed out of my head. But in the morning they were still so real in my memory—as if they had to be real somewhere, and inhabit somebody’s head—that I hoped that didn’t mean Felix was having them. It was Saturday, and the more I thought about it, the more I worried about him. So I went back over to St. Thomas’s and found him in the herb garden at the back of the church, weeding.
The herb garden was the Altar Society’s idea—to make the church look just like it did when it was founded in 1800-something. Back then, the Indians they were trying to convert would have been the ones working in the garden; not really voluntarily, but the Altar Society has sort of sidestepped that fact. The Church was really awful to the Indians, it’s a wonder any of the Chumash people around here will even speak to us.
Felix had on that ratty old bathrobe, and he was kneeling in a pool of sun by a stone bench, setting out lavender starts. He was barefoot and the bald spot in his gray hair looked like a monk’s tonsure. He really did look like he might be a brother in some old monastery.
“Hey,” I said.
He sat up on his heels and smiled at me. “Hey, yourself.”
“If I don’t have those dreams, does it mean you get them?” I asked him. They were so awful. Maybe I could stand them for a while, just to keep him from having them. After all, he’d been taking on my troubles since I was nine.
“Did you get them again last night?” He looked worried now.
“No,” I said. “Did you?”
“No, I dreamed I was riding a camel through this big mountain of whipped cream.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was lying to make me feel better or not. It sounded like a dream somebody might have.
“Fish were swimming out of my ears,” he added.
I had to laugh. And I could tell he wasn’t going to tell me whether it was true or not.
“Did you pray?” he asked me.
“Kind of. I thought about God, and how everybody says he’s on their side. He can’t be on both sides.” Unless, of course, he is a dog. Dogs love everybody.
“That’s why every religion claims that everyone else’s God is really the devil,” Felix said.
“Why can’t they all be the same God with different names?”
“Watch out. That’s the kind of thinking that got me un-sainted.”
“How do you know?” I asked him. “You said you didn’t know why it happened.” Now I was talking like he really was St. Felix.
“Well, being St. Felix is very specific to Christianity. I mean, the Virgin came and rang the cloister bells for me and all.”
I suppose he read the same Lives of the Saints in the parish library that I did. At any rate, I wasn’t going to get into a discussion with him about whether he’d actually seen the Virgin Mary.
But I must have looked skeptical, because he said, “If Juan Diego can see her, I can see her.”
Juan Diego is the Aztec Indian who supposedly saw the Virgin of Guadalupe and converted all his friends afterward. He maybe didn’t really exist any more than St. Felix of Valois did, although the Pope canonized him. But I couldn’t help it; I said, “What was she like?”
Felix stared across the herb garden, like he was looking straight through the adobe wall, and said, “This woman had a baby, all wrapped in a shawl, you know?”
“The Virgin?”
“No, she shoved the baby at the lieutenant and he took it. Then she ran like a bat outta hel
l, and the baby exploded. The lieutenant was standing under this tree, you know, and there were scraps of him and the baby hanging off the tree. The tree was all burned black. That was when I saw her. She was just hanging in the air over the tree, in her blue gown, and she looked so sad.”
“Oh my God.” I sat down on the bench. There was no way I was going to remind him that he’d just said she rang the bells for him in the monastery. It was clear that this was where he’d really seen her. Or seen something.
“She had on this starry cloak,” he said softly. “And she said, ‘You’re late.’”
“Felix—”
“Scared the shit outta me, because I didn’t want to go, you know, not where the lieutenant had gone.” He looked up at me and he was back in the herb garden again, not wherever he’d been a second before.
“Do you dream about that?” I asked him, scared to get an answer.
He smiled. “Just about the Virgin. She always has her hands full of roses, that’s how I know it’s her.”
I hoped he was telling the truth. I did not want to have the dream about the baby. If I had to, I thought, bargaining with whoever was in charge of these things, I would take the one about the boy with his insides taped to his chest instead.
“Felix, is that what it was like for Jesse?” I asked. “In Afghanistan?”
“I don’t know. Alike and different, I expect. There’s a kid who was in Afghanistan in a group I go to sometimes.”
“What kind of group? You mean, like, a support group?” I wondered if he tries to tell them he’s St. Felix.
“Yeah. At the VA.”
Maybe a support group would be good for Jesse, I thought. I hung around while Felix put the rest of the lavender starts in the bed, and on the way home I bought a PEACE NOW bumper sticker from the Unitarians, who were having another vigil. I asked Ben if I could put it on his car. He said he doubted a bumper sticker here would have much influence there, but go ahead, peace was a fine sentiment for the season, what with Thanksgiving coming up.
On Monday, a group of kids were selling the bumper stickers at school, so I bought another one and put it on my art portfolio. Jesse saw it as soon as I came into class and made a sort of snorting noise.
“What?” I said.
“Huge political statement,” he said, trying to get comfortable on his stool with the artificial leg.
“That’s what Ben said,” I admitted. “But you have to do something. I can’t go to demonstrations. I’m too young to drive.”
“And you would want to … why?” he asked.
That kind of surprised me. “Because something that gives people permanent nightmares can’t be something we ought to be doing,” I said.
“Leave my fucking dreams out of this!” he snapped at me, glaring.
I sucked my breath in—he looked so mad all of a sudden. “I didn’t mean your dreams,” I said hastily. I didn’t know he had dreams, although I expect he must. Anybody would. I wasn’t sure I could explain what I did mean, but he looked too mad to listen to me anyway.
“No, of course not.” Now he sounded sarcastic and mean. “I’m not the only headcase you know.”
“Actually, you’re not!”
“Peace now,” he said in a whiny voice. “You have no clue what it’s about, none, do you?”
“I know you got hurt,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say to him. It was like he’d suddenly turned into somebody totally different. His face was tight, and there was that tic beside his eye that looked as if something under his skin was trying to get out.
“You don’t know shit!” He grabbed a black marker and scrawled it all over the bumper sticker on my portfolio.
“I know people have to take a side for what they believe in!” I pulled my portfolio away from him. I could feel myself tearing up and I bit down on my lip to try to stop it.
Jesse pounded his fist on the art table, rattling it. “No, I don’t!” He was loud, and everyone swiveled around to stare at us. “It’s none of your business! Or theirs! I’m not your goddamn anti-war poster boy! And tell the VFW to go to hell too! I’m not going to be their tame hero! Leave me alone! All of you, just leave me the fuck alone!” He was shouting now, so angry he was spitting his words in my face. “Leave me the fuck alone!” he yelled again, and kicked his stool away with his good leg. It slammed against the next table. His portfolio slid off our table onto the floor, all his sketches falling out of it.
Mr. Petrillo flew across the room. “Jesse!”
“You leave me alone, too!” Jesse shoved past him and lurched around the tables, stepping on his drawings. He yanked the classroom door open and slammed it against the wall so hard the windows rattled. He turned around and threw the marker back in the room before he left.
“Oh. My. God,” a girl in the corner said. There were a couple of uncertain snickers from the other tables.
“That was scary.”
“Jesus, Arnaz, you always have that effect on guys?” someone said to me.
Someone else laughed. My face was burning.
“Jesse has … issues, obviously,” Mr. Petrillo said. He looked pretty shook up himself. “Let’s just leave him to deal with them, and … I’ll be back in a moment. Please work on your self-portraits while I’m gone.”
I picked up Jesse’s portfolio and collected the sketches that were scattered on the floor. A couple of them were torn or had footprints on them. There were a lot of them that were just mazes, in all different colors, harsh angular patterns that were really kind of pretty but sad at the same time. His self-portrait had mazes all around his head, too, stiff dark ones that blended with his hair. I slid them back in the portfolio and tied the top. I wondered what I should do with it and I wanted to cry.
The noise in the classroom slowly picked up again.
“That dude’s just crazy.”
“You think Petrillo’s gone to get the cops?”
“Man, I would. That dude needs to be in the psych ward.”
Lily, on the other hand, said it wasn’t unusual when I told her about it. “PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. It can manifest as rage.” Her mom is a psychologist. “You get it from trauma. Not just from wars—anybody can get it. Rape victims, for instance. Or people who’ve been in floods, or anything really heavy.”
“I guess that would be Jesse,” I said. “I’ve still got his portfolio. Should I just give it to Mr. Petrillo, or should I take it to him? I really want to see if he’s okay.”
“Mmm.” Lily bit her lip—channeling her mom, I think. “Take it to him, but not by yourself. And wait and see if he comes back to school first. If he doesn’t, I’ll go with you.”
8
I thought about Jesse all this week, but he didn’t come back to school. And then on Sunday, Father Weatherford came bustling up to the youth group after Mass with the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
“We’re going to put our little church on the map this year, my friends.” He beamed at us. “We are going to have a Las Posadas walk at Christmas, followed by a live nativity!”
We all looked at each other as if our collective doom had been announced. Noah Michalski pointed his finger down his throat behind Father Weatherford’s back and made gagging faces.
Las Posadas means “the inns” in Spanish. It’s a big procession where Mary and Joseph go around knocking on neighborhood doors and getting turned away, and finally, at the house that lets them in, there’s a big party. Father Weatherford is going to make a pageant of it, and march us down Ayala Avenue to the church, where we’ll end up with a live nativity and a cast of thousands.
“I have the cast all worked out,” he said. “Angie, you’re going to be our Mary. And …” He let his eye wander over the rest of us, then held up one finger as if he’d just thought of it. “And Noah, you will be our Joseph!”
This was clearly Father Weatherford’s idea for bringing the stray lamb back to the fold, since Noah hardly ever comes to church. It was just his bad luck his mother dragged
him along that morning.
I tried to think of how to say I’d rather be crucified in a way that wouldn’t offend Father Weatherford, and I could tell that Noah was, too, but by then Father was doling out supporting roles as innkeepers and magi, and the usual cast of shepherds and angels. I have never seen anyone look so thrilled over a terrible idea. “I’ve made arrangements for live animals—sheep and camels and a donkey for Mary to ride!”
Noah honked in my ear and flapped his hands over his head like donkey ears.
“Shut up!” I stomped on his foot.
So, I’m going to ride a donkey down Ayala Avenue while Noah leads it. It’ll probably buck me off. We’ll stop at any store that Father Weatherford can get to go along with it all, and end up at the nativity set in front of the church, where the sheep and camels will be waiting by the manger. I will produce a baby doll previously hidden under the straw in the manger (at least he doesn’t want it to be produced from under my dress), and the Baby Jesus will be born. I’m not even going to report on the stupid suggestions Noah made about all this.
I was so disgusted, I told Wuffie I would walk home. I went around to the back garden and told Felix about it.
“I’ll die if I have to be in a pageant with that idiot and have a baby.” I sat down on a bench beside where Felix was weeding. The air smelled like sage. “Nobody can talk about anything but sex, but Noah Michalski is the worst. He laughed all the way through Biology while Ms. Knight was explaining how trees pollinate. And my mom would rather I went out with him than Jesse!”
It felt like it did when I used to talk to Felix’s statue, which was weird. But he already knew the backstory, as Ben would say.
“Ah, he’ll grow up,” Felix said now. “He may not even be a bad kid. You might marry him some day.”
I looked horrified.
“Just don’t get in the back seat of a car with him now.”
“I wouldn’t get in the same room with him if I could help it.”
What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Page 6
