She’d been to Woonsocket?
“I stayed a night in Providence when I was younger. In the sixties, you know, they clogged the river up with their garbage,” she said. “They dammed it. Sent guys in to clear debris from the bottom. Everyone’s always tossing their crap in there—love letters, pop bottles, whatever.”
The four of us nodded.
She thought for a moment, then speared the last bit of zucchini with her fork, and said, “You think the water ever gets tired? Tired of going all the time.”
It didn’t seem like the others knew what she meant, but I nodded. Yes, the water was probably exhausted.
* * *
Later I went to the toilet and chose the stall adjacent to the handicapped. I could hear Mother Roberta and the young aide struggling. “Oh, son of a pup,” said Mother Roberta, and the aide said, “Here, let me,” and Mother Roberta said, hotly, “I’ve got it,” and the aide said, “Okay.”
When the three of us were at the sinks, I looked at Mother Roberta in the mirror.
“Mother Roberta,” I said. “I was—do you think—I’ve been wanting to ask—”
I turned to face them, and the aide stared at me, but I ignored her and took a breath.
“I want to know if the questions you ask, now that you’re older, are any different from the ones you asked when you were young.” We looked at each other. “I want to know if you think a person asks the same questions forever.”
Mother Roberta considered this. She said, “Some of the questions never change.”
I nodded, trying to understand what this would mean for me.
“Agatha,” she said, gently. “You can’t change most of the questions. But you can always come up with another answer. Remember that.”
She seemed to know something about me I hadn’t yet allowed to be true.
The aide handed her a paper towel and asked her if she was ready for a slice of cake, and Mother Roberta said, “Uh-huh.” They went off together, and when she was on the other side of the door, she turned back.
“I think the best you can do is pray about it,” she said, “but row toward shore.”
I was at a loss for words again, even though I knew that this was the last time I would see Mother Roberta: her belly full of mediocre vegetables, being led away by a woman who wasn’t me.
76.
On our drive home, we spent nearly an hour on the two-lane highway behind two large trucks going the same speed, coasting side by side. We were unable to pass, and Therese grew frustrated. “Son of a scout!” she yelled out the window at some point, though of course the driver couldn’t hear. She coasted on the shoulder, trying to flash her lights so the driver might see.
When one of the drivers finally pulled ahead and provided us space to pass, we soared past the trucks, unencumbered and unafraid. The sun was setting in New York, and it seemed a special sun, designed specifically for the people of the wide state, who had nothing to do but get up each morning and wait for their sun to sink below the horizon, and if they were lucky, as they were that day, the sun was generous in its light and in the colors it made of the clouds. Bright violet and pink and orange that made the sky seem to expand, and I was reminded then of the enormity of the galaxy. It was easy to forget that the universe unfolded for years and years beyond the mite of it that I could see.
* * *
The moment I wish most often I could return to, if only I were able to wade backward through the mud of time, is the split second the four of us spent together on the bridge over the Blackstone River, on the final leg of our drive, the last few miles before home. The Blackstone River’s just a skinny capillary, and the bridge is only a couple of hundred feet across. But that night, when we all took a hyperbolic breath and held it, Frances switched to the rightmost lane and slowed way down so that the bridge might last a little longer, and we seemed in that moment to float above the brackish river, and the water seemed more beautiful now that we knew Mother Roberta had seen it years before, and in the dark we could not see the garbage that collected on its banks, just the shimmering spots where the water caught the moon, and we crept on, alone on the unlit bridge, and we felt our hearts throb and our faces go red, desperate as we were for air, desperate to reach the other side so we could suck fresh breaths; at the same time, though, we hoped the bridge would go on and on; it seemed we had been able, in holding our breath, to stop time; even though we knew that God only led us forward through the mud and refused to let any of us stay still, we hoped to stay forever in that car that wasn’t ours, still happy and unbreathing, still unaware of all the pain awaiting us.
77.
We should have known from the newspapers: there were two newspapers on the driveway, still wrapped in blue plastic, untouched.
We should have known from the fact that Abbess Paracleta and Baby and Pete and Eileen were sitting on the front steps of Little Neon, as if they’d been waiting for us all weekend. That should have given it away.
But we didn’t know. We didn’t know until the abbess stood up and told us, standing outside our green house, that Tim Gary had died.
* * *
She’d tried to call us at the Motel 6, she said, probably ninety times. She’d left so many messages; hadn’t the front desk passed them along?
Therese said, “Maybe, but we wouldn’t know, because we weren’t at the Motel 6. We were at the Super 8.”
“Shoot. Six, eight—I see what I did,” the abbess said.
“What happened?” Mary Lucille asked. She was already weeping. “What happened?”
Baby found him in bed in the morning, under his covers. “He was a different kind of pale. For a second I thought he was just really tired,” he said. “But then I saw the puddle of throw-up. I wish I’d heard him barf, woken up sooner, done something. But he wasn’t breathing.” Baby didn’t scream. “I didn’t want to wake up the abbess, or the girls. I just woke up Pete, because he was right there.”
“I’d have thought his lips would be blue,” Pete said, “but they were gray. Gray like tile caulk.” He told us about Tim Gary’s violet hands, his arms so stiff you could snap them in half.
Pete called an ambulance. “It felt like a long time,” Baby said, “waiting, after he hung up the phone.” He and Pete smoked three cigarettes, standing in the street, watching for the lights of the ambulance. The siren is what woke up the abbess and Eileen, and they stared out the front window, waiting for Pete and Baby to usher the paramedics inside, which was when they found out what was wrong.
Antifreeze—for the radiator in the white van, Therese had bought antifreeze in bulk jugs the size of a suitcase. I couldn’t get the image out of my head: Tim Gary in the garage, lifting the jug to pour himself a glass. All conviction, all focus. Swallowing hard to get it down. Then doing it again and again. The doctors said he drank a little less than a liter.
The paramedics came quietly, their eyes cast low. Because of the color of him, they knew not to try to resuscitate him; it was hours too late for that.
“Were they gentle,” I said.
“Yeah,” Pete said. “They were gentle.”
But I needed to hear it again. “Were they gentle, Baby?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “They were.”
“Eileen? Were they?”
“They were.”
“Abbess Paracleta?” I said. “Did you think they were gentle?”
“Yes. They were gentle.”
With gloved hands they lifted Tim Gary onto a stretcher, and then they unfolded a sheet of gauze to cover his body from head to toe. Something blistered inside me when I thought of it: his face covered up. It should have shown heavenward. I’d have pulled the gauze back, if I’d been there. A man like Tim Gary should be facing God when he left our house for the last time.
78.
I wanted to believe that Tim Gary had thought of us in the last seconds before his heart shut down, but I’ve since understood that what he thought was nothing at all, because his brain was the fi
rst thing to go. The doctors said his body took about six hours to shut down. He maybe had a seizure, but if he did, he didn’t thrash loud enough to wake Baby or Pete. He would have sweated through his clothes, the sheets. And then there was the vomit, but he was likely unconscious by then.
And before his mind went, did he see God? Did he see someone who loved him?
The doctors couldn’t answer that.
* * *
Everyone gets where they need to be, Mother Roberta had told us once. As religious sisters we were meant to surrender our needs, obey the whims of the Lord. Give it all up to God. We had no will, no command, aside from carrying out His.
We could create nothing more than a cake. All creation was left to the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And death? We were meant to understand that death was not a can of soup or a type of gasoline; in other words, we could not choose it for ourselves.
For days we busied ourselves with minutiae: labeling and freezing the shepherd’s pie brought by Raquelle, who worked with him at the restaurant. We had to call the morgue. We had to call the bank, the post office. No one could find the information for his ex-wife.
Abbess Paracleta had gone home to Providence the night we returned. I don’t think anyone slept that night. Baby and Pete stayed all night in the living room, nose to toe on the corduroy couch; they asked to, and we couldn’t say no.
And then the abbess came back the next day. To sort out details, she said. It was like the lights coming on at the end of a movie, reminding us that real life waited.
By the time Abbess Paracleta had hung up her raincoat and slipped off her clogs, Therese had microwaved a plate of shepherd’s pie and filled a glass with tap water.
The abbess didn’t eat her food so much as memorize it, turning it over with her fork.
She helped us arrange the wake and the funeral, and then more or less took over. She called the Bigg brothers, who ran the funeral home in Woonsocket. We’d have a luncheon after, she decided, here in Little Neon.
Frances said, “Actually, I spoke with Raquelle, and she said we could have it at the restaurant, where he worked, and they could give us—”
The abbess put up her palm. “It’s not up for discussion.” She seemed surprised by her own anger. Red-faced, she stood and went to scrape heavy lumps of potatoes into the trash.
79.
They buried Tim Gary on a Tuesday, before the sun got hot. The abbess organized a sixty-minute service at the church. It’s customary to have a prayer service, before the body is taken from the funeral home to the church, and I told one of the Bigg brothers I’d like to lead the prayer service. A Glory Be and an Our Father and a few words about Tim Gary.
The Bigg boy had wide, frenzied eyes, and they went even wider with the idea. “That’s not how it’s done,” he said, and shook his head, but he told me I could call the bishop and ask for special permission.
The bishop’s secretary told me he was baptizing in New Haven all week, but she could try to reach him. I never heard back.
Abbess Paracleta drove us in the white van. Lawnmower Jill was already in the church when we arrived, in a pew in the back. I gave her a wave, and she started to cry. The rest of us went to sit in the front: my sisters, Baby, Pete, Eileen. I counted six people I didn’t recognize in the pews between.
The bishop’s eulogy startled me. He quoted the Bible in angry passages. He reviled Tim Gary for what he called “the ultimate sin: taking away the Lord’s great gift of life.”
In the pew I looked at my sisters with incredulous eyes. We were grieving people. He’d have done better to sing us a psalm or allow us a moment of silence.
When the others did not return my incredulity, I turned back to the bishop and set my eyes to glaring. Tim Gary was someone who loved God, who prayed and went to Mass and read the Bible and was never unkind or cruel, and he tried hard to be happy. And in turn the bishop stood behind the lectern and turned Tim Gary into not a body to be mourned, but a body to be cut up and used for parts. The stuff of a hundred Sunday homilies.
80.
I didn’t know what to do with all my grief. It was mutating into fresh rage. It was becoming unseemly, teaming up with all my little disappointments to rise up and overtake me.
I had no choice but to surrender. I have loved church since childhood, back when I first knew grief, when I learned what it meant to have a mother die. Helpless me. I had no idea that the church could break your heart. I could never have imagined, in those days, a feeling big enough, strong enough, to take me from it. I could never have imagined giving up.
* * *
Sometime after Tim Gary died, I went to confession. I drew the curtain closed and kneeled and faced the metal lattice. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said.
I knew Father Steve was the one on the other side of the lattice, and I knew he would recognize me from my voice. So it took me a moment to work up the nerve to say everything I wanted to say. But when I was ready, it came without stopping. If Father Steve felt like interrupting, I never gave him the chance. And when I’d said it all, I stood and left. I didn’t want to know what penance he thought I ought to do.
“My sin,” I said, “or one of them, anyway, is wrath.” And I spoke all my ugly anger. I listed every unfair thing. I’d given all my years to the church, I said. And now I wished I had served God some other way. I was starting to understand that Tim Gary would never walk up the driveway to Little Neon ever again. I told him that even when I was okay I wasn’t okay: I was frenetic with anger. I kept looking for hope and came up only with outrage.
Maybe things would change, I said. Maybe one day the men of the church would wake up and decide to make some amendments, double back on their decrees. Maybe they’d deign to reconsider the way things worked. Surely they would, right? Someday?
But I was tired. I told Father Steve that I have looked at the world and found it wanting. The world has had women for such a long time, I said. I did not know how to be patient anymore.
81.
We women have found ways to bind ourselves to each other—floss bracelets, chain necklaces, pairs of Kroger nylons. Stolen glances and eyes across the table. Donuts. Waving from windows, saving each other seats. The girls at the school liked to pass around a tube of lipstick, the most intimate thing I’d ever seen, and when it finished its loop they all had the same bright pink mouth.
We know how to mark ourselves with love, and we know how to hide away our rage. And somehow, we still exist in the world, carrying the consolation that at least we have each other.
When I left my sisters, I left with nothing.
82.
For the people who asked, I developed a script. “I found that religious life, while rich and wonderful in many ways, kept me from serving God to the best of my abilities.”
People wanted an inciting incident, a chain of cause and effect, but I only gave them this single sentence; neat and serviceable and vague. I did not know what I would have said if anyone asked what my abilities were. Thank God they never did.
I thought often of one of the young nuns who’d left, years before, after hundreds of priests were accused of abuse. “What do you do with all your anger?” she asked me. We were in the laundry room, folding whites.
And I lied. I said I didn’t get angry, not ever, not me.
83.
I went to live with my younger brother and his girlfriend—just a couple of weeks, I promised them, but weeks would become months would become many months. “As long as you need,” he said. Each time I apologized, but I knew he meant what he said.
My little brother, Jim. My bearded little brother, Jim, who did things with computers for a living and, when he was young, liked raspberry jam and cried at the end of Bambi. Jim, who at four asked me if our mother was a nice lady. Who told me, after I decided to become a nun, that he’d miss me. We had always been fond of each other, but we’d never found a way to be close.
He was stiff and polite, picking me up from the Greyhound station. We remembered to hug each other, standing in front of his car.
I was back in Buffalo, sweaty and clutching a duffel bag. It was June, six weeks after Tim Gary died. The air-conditioning on the last of the three buses had not worked, and I had sweated through the crotch of my Goodwill jeans and the collar of my Goodwill shirt. I found it was easy to pass as another normal person in jeans on the bus. It was harder to know how to feel.
I didn’t know if it was sorrow or relief that made me start to cry as soon as my brother shut the driver’s side door and asked how my trip was.
If my brother was uncomfortable with my crying, he didn’t show it. He drove without speaking and didn’t ask me to explain, which I considered a mercy. Every mile we drove took me further and further from who I’d been. My throat fluttered with sobs, and when my brother merged onto the highway, the blinker was like a ticking clock.
* * *
At their apartment, I tried to be pleasant and at ease. Jules, my brother’s girlfriend, guided me from room to room and spoke demurely, like a curator. There were things I saw that made me blush: the lace bra hanging from the knob on the laundry room door, the strip of photos on the fridge of them kissing, smiling, sticking out their tongues. Jules was a woman with a tiny waist and long hair. Her blouse looked like expensive silk. Every inch of her was pretty, and this made me hate the look of my Goodwill jeans, the plain sneakers I kept outside the door.
I made an effort to be neat. Each morning I reassembled the futon and folded the sheets. I kept my clothes in the hallway closet, my toothbrush under the sink. I wanted them to be able to forget I was there. So I stayed quiet. When Jules let the shower run for whole minutes while she ate a piece of toast in the kitchen, I did not remind her of the waste. Though I was tempted each time I reached for my box of oatmeal, I did not eat the chocolate-covered pretzels in the pantry. They did not belong to me.
Agatha of Little Neon Page 19
