Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  It was a long and spectacular fall and partway down he met her there and it was like they seized each other midair so that when the final crest splintered into blinding sensation, she was aware of him there with her and it was new.

  It was new, it was like nothing she’d ever felt before, a feeling of being out of herself and part of him just for those seconds, her energy stretching and flickering and it seemed incredibly dangerous, like she might snap and not return to herself, but she let it happen anyway, and afterward she lay on top of him and waited for the part that had left her to come back, and the part that was him to leave her, and when it didn’t happen right away she began to panic but even her panic wasn’t enough to make her lift her body away from his, because she lay in a state of such exhaustion and spent and total dissipation that moving was impossible.

  Much, much later she felt his hands in her hair, fingers gentle against her scalp, working the strands into tangles, and he said, “They’re applauding,” and while she tried to make sense of his words she marveled at the feel of his voice, the way it formed in his chest and rumbled against her cheek.

  And then she realized that he meant the sounds outside the tent, which only now entered her conscious mind: a smattering of clapping and laughter and one distinct voice saying, “That’s how it’s done, brother,” and another saying, “Could everyone shut the fuck up and let the rest of us sleep.”

  Cass burned with mortification. She didn’t remember making any sound-in those final seconds her hearing seemed to have gone the way of her vision, as though the darkness had stolen it, too-but she must have cried out. She didn’t do that, ordinarily, but she remembered the cry building in her throat right before everything splintered and it must have been loud enough to wake up the people sleeping nearby.

  Her greater worry-the fact that the man beneath her was slowly turning back into Smoke-was too much to think about now. She pushed her face into the hollow of his shoulder and willed herself not to think about it.

  When he said, very softly, “Sweet dreams, Cass,” she said over and over in her mind, “I do not hear you. I do not hear you.”

  I do not hear you, because you aren’t really there.

  29

  IN THE MORNING SHE WAS ALONE IN THE TENT and she thought: Smoke is a man who comes and goes quietly.

  And then she thought-Ruthie. Today was the day she would find out how to get inside the Convent, and she would search for her Ruthie.

  Do the next right thing, Pat’s voice-Hello, my name is Pat and I’m an alcoholic-said in her head, all reasonable insistence, the voice of a hundred meetings in the church basement. Pat listened; Pat never judged. Pat was bald except for a silver fringe on the back of his head and looked like he ought to be a grandfather, and Pat just kept listening. What if I don’t know the next right thing, Cass had demanded-had whined really, if she were to be honest-and Pat had said, It’s only one little next right thing, Cass, don’t think so hard, and the guy with the red hair-she couldn’t remember his name now because he didn’t last more than a few months-had muttered, Man plans and God laughs, which had struck Cass as funny and kind of clever, in context, a lot more clever than any of the stupid A.A. phrases…but by summer that guy was gone and Cass was still there so who was right, in the end?

  So she would do the next right thing, and that thing was: Find Gloria.

  She took the little bucket of personal supplies to the bathroom and was relieved to find that there was no further charge to use it, because Smoke had done all their trading and she didn’t know how it was done and she didn’t feel like letting her ignorance show. There was no sign of Smoke and Cass only saw a few other people trudging between the tents, shivering in hoodies and flannel shirts, and she realized that it was earlier than she’d first thought, maybe six or six-thirty on a late-summer morning.

  When she returned to their tent she saw that Faye was standing in front of it, holding a steaming mug.

  “There you are,” she said with a sly smile.

  “Sorry, I was just at the, uh, ladies’ room.”

  “Word is you two put on a bit of a show last night,” Faye said conversationally, and Cass felt her face redden. “Hey, you provided everyone some entertainment around here. And you got something that did you good. So chill. You ready to go meet Gloria?”

  “Yeah, just let me get-something,” she said, and poked her head into the tent. Really, she only wanted to see if Smoke had returned, but nothing looked disturbed. The covers were still tangled. Her pack was where she left it.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  Faye led her through the camp. They passed the merchant stands, where people were stacking and arranging their wares-their toothbrushes and playing cards and packets of aspirin and Theraflu, their paper plates and toilet paper and candles and cans of beans and condensed milk and Chef Boyardee-and righting overturned camp chairs and cleaning up litter from the night before. A fire burned in a grate near where the remains of the bonfire smoldered, and coffee boiled in a pot on top, and Cass felt her stomach growl. Well, maybe later she could ask Smoke to buy her a meal. And coffee-a cup of hot, thick coffee. But for now she would concentrate on Gloria.

  “Here,” Faye said abruptly, veering off to the left, past the fenced-off area where the bike Smoke had traded was parked next to other motorcycles and a few bicycles and skateboards. “The cheap seats.”

  Cass hadn’t noticed them the night before-a row of canvas cots lined up next to the fence. In nearly all of them, motionless forms slept under drab, rough blankets, a few possessions piled under the ends of the beds.

  Cass followed Faye to the end of the row, trying not to stare. At the very end a woman with long gray hair escaping its braid sat with her back to them at the edge of her cot, bent over her knees; too late Cass realized she was throwing up.

  “Aw, shit, Gloria,” Faye exclaimed. “Here?”

  “I’ll clean it up, I’ll clean it up,” the woman said hastily, her voice reedy and frail, a girl’s voice in a middle-aged woman’s body. “I’m sorry, I think I must have eaten something-”

  “You mean, like a fifth of cheap gin,” Faye growled. “I’ll send someone. You didn’t get it on the bed, did you?”

  “No, no, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Okay, well, I brought you someone who wants to talk to you. Take a walk with her. We’ll have this taken care of when you get back.”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you,” Gloria said. She stood and started to walk down the path along the fence, not even looking at Cass, who hurried to catch up.

  “You’re the girl wants to get in the Convent,” she said when Cass fell into step with her, stealing a sideways glance as though she was afraid of being found out. “They told me you’d come.”

  Cass saw pale green eyes in a weathered face, lashes bleached by the sun, cheekbones that were still regal. Gloria had once been a beauty, but Cass saw something else, something that was as familiar to her as the chipped, heavy mugs at the meetings: more regrets than a human being could keep hidden, so that they found their way to the surface, traced in the faint lines and creases of her skin.

  “I do want to get in,” she said carefully. “I need your help.”

  The corner of Gloria’s mouth twitched, a tic that only underscored her anxiety, and darted a glance at Cass. “How do I know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re who you say you are. That you’re not one of theirs.”

  “One of…whose?”

  Gloria’s tic intensified and she pressed a fist against her mouth, pushing hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “They could have sent you. Mother Cora and the rest. To spy on me.”

  “Gloria…I don’t know who that is,” Cass said, trying to contain her impatience. “I just got here. I’ve never been in there. I need your help…please.”

  “They’re not supposed to come in here,” Gloria whispered, walking with her shoulders hunched. “It’s Dor’s rule. It’s his rule.”


  “The people…from the Convent, they aren’t allowed in here? In the Box?”

  “They can’t come in here.”

  “But I’m here. They let me in here. So, I can’t be from there, right?”

  Cass felt a little silly trying to reason with Gloria, but she could tell that the woman’s fear was real. Very gently, Cass touched her thin shoulder. Gloria startled at the touch, but after a moment she sighed and gave Cass another sidelong glance, pushing at the long gray hair that had come loose and tumbled around her shoulders.

  “I wish I had an elastic,” she said. “For my hair. Do you have an elastic?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Cass said.

  “Okay. That’s how it is-anytime you think of something that would actually be useful, you can never find it.”

  “You mean…”

  “In my house, I lived on the first floor of a nice old house. You should have seen it…I had a collection of tea tins. The ones with the pretty designs on them. Some of them were my mother’s. Oh, some of them were very old. And I don’t know, they may have been valuable, to someone, but I didn’t even care about them. They were just…always there, you know?”

  She sketched a shelf in the air with her fingers, and Cass knew she was seeing the tins in her mind, the way they looked in her kitchen. Cass had done the same thing a thousand times; nearly everyone had-remembering the things that were lost.

  But then Gloria chopped the air with the hand that had been tracing a memory, a harsh gesture followed by a sharper exhalation. “I never used them. They were empty, all of them, and they sat there and I looked at them all the time and I never took them off the shelf and put anything in them. And then-one day, in the Convent, I was on washing. Me and a woman named…something. Maybe it was Alice. We were pinning the clothes on the line. We had the cheap clothespins, a pack of a thousand someone got from the Wal-Mart, but, you know, Before. And they were in this plastic bag and they kept spilling out and we tried to twist the top closed but it just kept opening, all those clothespins lying on the ground, and I thought, my tins-it would have been perfect. The clothespins in the tins, and I wished right then that I had one of them, even one, just one. I would put the clothespins in the tin and there would be that one perfect thing. The one thing that was the way it ought to be. You know?”

  And the thing was, not only did Cass know but Gloria’s explanation was dead-on. She’d had the same complicated regret herself, over and over, the mourning for some small thing not because she missed the object itself but because in that moment everything seemed off. All solutions were imperfect solutions. And that wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, because you learned to improvise, you learned to make do. Except for once in a while when it hit you like this.

  “I know,” she said, and touched Gloria, gently.

  Gloria looked at her, then looked at the arm where Cass had touched her, and her eyes clouded and she picked at her crusty chapped lip. “Why do you want to go in there? It’s not nice there.”

  “Oh, I don’t. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to join. I’m looking for my daughter. Ruthie.”

  As she said the name the feeling was there again, the fear that Ruthie was not in the great looming stadium, that she was nowhere near here. Maybe she was nowhere at all anymore.

  Gloria put a hand to her cheek and frowned. “How old is your daughter?”

  “Almost three.” Three in September, if anyone was still keeping track by then.

  Gloria shook her head. “There’s little ones there. But they change all their names when they’re baptized.”

  “Baptized?”

  “Yes. Into the Order. In the ceremony, where they take their first communion and get their new names.” There was a note of sympathy in her voice, and she fixed her troubled gaze on Cass, her confusion momentarily lessened. “Tell me about your little girl. What does she look like?”

  So Cass told: the hair so pale in the sun that it looked like flashing dimes. The rosebud mouth that could crumple into a wobbly frown one moment and lift into a blazing smile the next. The fold in her chubby arms where the baby fat was still smooth and soft.

  As she talked Cass found herself speeding up, panicking, with the knowledge that her baby was months older now, that the rounded elbows and dimpled knees might have disappeared, that her hair would be longer and she would have a dozen new freckles and have learned to do things Cass couldn’t even imagine. Cass couldn’t know all the ways Ruthie would have grown and changed, and it felt like a betrayal.

  “I don’t know,” Gloria said, interrupting Cass midsentence, shaking her head. “It’s too hard to know. And they change them. They mix them up like they mix me up. I heard talk.”

  “What do you mean? What kind of talk?”

  Gloria twisted her mouth into an expression of fury. “Hypocritical talk,” she spat. “The kind I can’t stand. The kind that drove me right back out here.”

  Right back to the bottle-she didn’t say it, but it was clear to Cass, and Cass didn’t judge. She knew how it was-the filament that wasn’t strong enough, the way it stretched and stretched before it snapped, leaving you hurtling through the air toward devastation.

  Still, there was hope. There were girls in the Convent, and one of them could be Ruthie, and she would find out, but she needed Gloria to focus. They approached an old picnic bench set on uneven ground under a dead pepper tree. “Let’s sit,” she suggested, sweeping dirt and twigs off the splintered wood, and Gloria sat, her expression troubled and confused.

  “What kind of talk did you hear?” Cass pleaded, hoping the woman could keep it together a little longer.

  “Talk talk,” Gloria muttered. She found a groove in the weathered wood with her forefinger. Her hands were surprisingly elegant, unlined and narrow with long fingers and neat nails. She rubbed at the groove gently, seemingly oblivious to the splintered edges. “They said I didn’t have enough faith. I said they didn’t have enough faith. I know what I know. I watched…the sun painted the rocks and I saw God, I told them that but they said I didn’t have the faith. I wouldn’t drink the essence so they said I didn’t have the faith.”

  “Saw God…Gloria, when did you see God?”

  Gloria’s skittering gaze landed on her and stayed, like a butterfly on a coneflower, skittish. “Matthew. Before Matthew…before he was gone.”

  “Who was Matthew?”

  “Matthew?” Gloria glared at her, affronted, and Cass watched her awareness fade in the eddies and whorls of memory. “I married him…we went to Yosemite. I watched God, in the mornings, the way he painted the rocks with the sun. Matthew was there. We were happy.” She startled out of her reverie and seemed surprised to find Cass there. “I married him,” she repeated, sternly. “We were happy. They can’t tell me I don’t have faith.”

  Her twitching fingers went to her mouth again, covering, pinching, worrying, and Cass could sense Gloria turning inward again. Who knew what happened to Matthew…maybe he was Gloria’s childhood sweetheart, dead twenty years in an accident. Or maybe he’d been taken, or died of fever only months ago. Either way, Gloria wore the loss like an amulet, a token against the weight of Aftertime.

  “I’m sorry about Matthew,” Cass said gently.

  Gloria made a sound in her throat and nodded, dropping her hands to her lap. She only wanted to be heard, Cass thought-only that. And for things to be different. What anyone wanted.

  But Cass needed more from her. “I’m so sorry to ask. But is there anything else you can tell me about what goes on in there? With the babies, the little girls? How they’re cared for, where they end up?”

  Gloria was shaking her head before Cass finished speaking.

  “Not little girls, not,” she mumbled. “Not little girls anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When they’re done, when they’re baptized. They’re only vessels. There’s nothing left inside.”

  30

  “WHAT,” CASS MANAGED TO WHISPER, HER throat twis
ting closed.

  “‘Be thou a vessel of innocence,’” Gloria chanted softly. The skin twitched near her left eye. “‘Scoured clean of this world.’ They baptized them.”

  “What else did they do?”

  “The hair and the dress,” Gloria mumbled. “All the little dresses. White for purity. Purity for innocence. And no talking. No, no, no talking.”

  “They put them in baptism dresses?” Cass repeated, scrambling to make sense of Gloria’s tormented muttering. “And there’s no talking during the ceremony. And what happens next?”

  “Scoured clean.”

  The phrase raised the hairs along her arm. “What does that mean, Gloria? They…wash or scrub them somehow?”

  Gloria peeked at Cass, her darting eyes bright with her fevered thoughts. “You won’t know her,” she said sadly. “Don’t go. She’s not yours anymore. She’s innocent now. And they hide them.”

  Ruthie was always innocent, Cass wanted to scream, wanted to make Gloria see her the way she had been, in her denim overalls and tiny little flowered t-shirt, falling asleep in Cass’s lap. But Gloria pushed herself off the bench and started walking again, her footsteps unsteady and lurching.

  Cass went after her, put a hand on her arm. Gloria yanked away from her touch, crossing her arms tightly in front of her, shaking her head.