The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  “Who’s that?” Laird peered intently at the man standing just outside the doorway.

  “It’s my father,” Jory whispered, as surprised by this as anyone else.

  Jory and her father stood out in the hallway. Jory kept her arms folded tight across her chest and her eyes deliberately trained on the floor. She could hear the quiet sounds coming from inside the open door of the earth science classroom—students sighing and turning pages in their books, someone coughing and then scooting the wooden legs of their chair back. Jory listened to the large corridor clock’s muted ticking. “You can’t just come to school like this, Dad,” she whispered.

  “Well, honey,” her father said in his normal tone of voice, which seemed suddenly to Jory unbearably loud and capable of carrying all the way down the hall. “Grace called me at work and said you’d forgotten your PE clothes. I left my meeting with the admissions committee just to get them for you.” He handed her the large brown Albertsons bag that contained her sweatpants and tennis shoes. “I thought you’d be pretty glad to see me.”

  Jory held the bag down by her side, as if it were full of something that smelled. “I guess you can go now,” she whispered, her chest a tight knot of bad feelings.

  “Okay.” Her father brought his lips together and gazed off toward the bank of pale green lockers. “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll get back to my own school.” He took a step toward the stairs, but then stopped. He reached out and put his hand on her upper arm. “Are you doing fine? Is everyone here treating you kindly?”

  Jory looked up at her father, incredulous.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Her father patted her arm. “Okay, then.”

  “Dad.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Never mind.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  They stood in the hall looking at each other.

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Jory closed her eyes. “I don’t feel okay. Something’s wrong with me.”

  “Like what?” He stepped closer and studied her face.

  “Like something bad.”

  “You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

  “I think I need to go home.” Jory swallowed and gripped the bag of clothes tight.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Um-hm.”

  “Do you have a fever?” Her father tried to put a hand on her forehead, but she stepped back.

  “No, it’s not like that,” she whispered. “It’s girl stuff.”

  Her father blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Well, all right. Hm. Let’s see. I guess we’ll have to tell someone. The secretary or someone.”

  “She’s upstairs.” Jory turned away from him. “I’ll go wait in the car.”

  Her father nodded.

  “I have to get my books first.”

  Jory stepped toward the open classroom door. Inside, everyone looked up as she walked quickly toward her end of the table. She gathered up her papers and books and began sliding them into her book bag.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Laird whispered as he watched her progress. “Where’re you going?”

  “Miss Quanbeck, are you planning on leaving us?” Mr. DeNovia stood in front of her.

  “I have to go home,” Jory said, not pausing in her packing. “A family emergency.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mr. DeNovia said. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

  All around the classroom the students lifted their heads and stopped whatever they were doing and were happily listening to this exchange. The girl with the elephant choker smiled at Jory, a strange, almost winking smile. “I have an emergency too,” she said, loudly, and stretched her arms above her head. “A boredom emergency.”

  “That’s too bad, Sylvia.” Mr. DeNovia checked his watch. “Since we’ve still got a good twenty minutes of study time left.”

  “Bleh.” The girl named Sylvia stuck out her tongue at Mr. DeNovia’s back. She leaned past Jory and whispered to Laird, “I could really use that thing you’ve got in your pocket.”

  “That’s what they all say.” Laird grinned and then turned toward Jory. “What happened? Is somebody dead?”

  Jory scooped up her pen and slung her book bag strap over her shoulder. “I wish,” she said.

  It was hot in the car. Jory’s back stuck to the Buick’s vinyl seat as she and her father drove along in silence. Jory watched the farmhouses slide by. She had ridden back and forth past this terrain enough that some part of her head had already memorized the landscape. The small, neatly kept green farmhouse and then the slightly more ostentatious redbrick one, the twinned metal grain silos overlooking the corral with the Appaloosa and the horse racing barrels, then the grayish house with its sagging, broken-toothed shutters and the rusty tractor peeking up from the weeds of the side yard. Cottonwoods, willows, elms, and then rows of cypress trees for windbreak. She could narrow her eyes and have all of it click past like so many train cars. She slumped lower in the seat. She was missing PE. The relief she felt churned bitterly in the lowest part of her stomach. She bit her inner cheek until a tiny thrill of pain forced her to stop. “I hate you,” she said under her breath. It wasn’t quite apparent who she was speaking to. Her tongue sought out the bitten spot in her cheek again. Her father drove on, his eyes on the road ahead.

  Jory and her father stood outside the car. “Thanks for bringing my stuff,” Jory said quietly.

  “Of course,” her father said, and gave her arm a final squeeze. “See you at home,” he said, and then almost visibly winced. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  “Will you be coming over on Sunday?” Jory picked up her bag of PE clothes and held it to her chest.

  “Sunday?”

  “For my birthday?”

  Her father seemed to be thinking about this, as if it required a great deal of study. “Well, of course we will,” he said at last.

  “All of you?”

  “All of us.” Her father nodded firmly. “We will all be over,” he said. “On Sunday. For your thirteenth birthday.” He ran his hands down the front of his pant legs. “That’s a very special day.”

  Jory deliberately bit down on the already raw spot in her cheek. “It’s my fourteenth.” She ran up the driveway and up the porch steps without looking back. Her father evidently was still standing next to the car, going nowhere.

  “What are you doing home?” Grace held a hand above her eyes, shading them from the sun. She peered up at Jory from where she was seated on the front step of the porch, an open copy of Teen Guideposts on her lap.

  “I’m not home,” Jory said, brushing past her. “And neither are you.”

  “What?” Grace turned around to watch Jory mount the top stair.

  Jory opened the front door and went inside. She threw her book bag and the Albertsons bag onto the couch. Then she ran up the stairs and went into the bathroom and sat down on the closed toilet lid. She put her chin in her hands and closed her eyes. She rubbed her feet across the small squares of tile. Outside, she could hear the muffled sounds of her father’s calm voice talking to her sister, and then there was the sound of a car engine starting up. Jory could hear her sister coming up the stairs.

  Grace knocked quietly on the bathroom door. “Jory,” she said.

  “What?” said Jory, after a long moment.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jory waited another few seconds and then stood up and unlocked the door. She stood in the doorway and faced her sister. Grace had a strange new expression on her face, one of pity mixed with a sort of radiant undisguised love. Jory felt sick. Grace folded her hands in front of her. “Dad says that you—well, that you’re not feeling very good.”

  Jory looked down at the swirled knots of wood in the hallway’s floor.
“Yeah, so,” she said. She traced one of the swirls with her toe.

  “Do you have anything . . . anything to use?”

  Jory felt her face heating up. She shook her head.

  Grace’s voice grew even more quiet. “Is this your first time?”

  Jory said nothing. Her tongue sought out the bitten spot on the inside of her cheek.

  Grace leaned shyly in toward Jory, her face still shining with the new expression. “God’s made you into a woman now,” she whispered.

  Jory bit down on the raised spot in her cheek and tasted the metally tang of her own blood.

  “You know,” Grace was still whispering as if they were at the library or in church, “I don’t have pads or anything for you to use since I’m not—well, since I don’t need anything now.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Well, no, obviously it’s not.” Grace made a little humming sound in the back of her throat. “Oh,” she said suddenly. “I think maybe I’ll go talk to Mrs. Kleinfelter.”

  “Don’t do that.” Jory gave Grace a pleading look.

  “It’s all right.” Grace put her hand on Jory’s arm. “Don’t be embarrassed. All women help each other with this. We all understand. I’ll go see if Mrs. Kleinfelter is home. I’ll be right back.” Grace gave Jory another shy smile and then turned and headed down the stairs.

  Jory slid down the wall and sat down on the bathroom floor. She was beginning to feel quite well acquainted with the small black-and-white tiles. Things seemed to be slipping past her control. Things that used to seem solid and firmly in place had now become liquidy, all slippery and impossible to grasp—like those slidey, shape-shifting puddles of mercury that escaped from the glass thermometer she had dropped when she was little. Because her mother would have had a fit if she’d known that Jory had broken their thermometer, Jory had tried and tried to scoop up the silver blobs, but it was like trying to pick up something only slightly thicker than water. She had finally resorted to half scooting the liquid rolling balls of silver under their old brown couch, where they probably still were, for all she knew. She leaned her back against the claw-foot tub and felt her heart beating like the steady, apparently unstoppable thing that it was. So many things had happened that she never would have dreamed could take place, and yet here she was still breathing and eating food and carrying on like none of it had changed anything. What would it take to make her body stop—anyone’s body stop—doing the things it did every day? Could your parents send you away and could your sister go nuts, could you lie stupid lies and steal things and maybe even kill someone, and yet nothing would happen to you? What about hell? What about punishment? Maybe that was the punishment—maybe Grace and the angel baby and the banishment to Henry’s house was the punishment for the things Jory had done before. Maybe this was how God got back at you—maybe you didn’t have to wait for hell. Maybe it came to you, like a large, messily wrapped and half-expected package in the mail. Jory knew her father would be disgusted by this pseudo-theology. God didn’t send packages. He didn’t need to. God just let you get in trouble all by yourself. And then he let you pay for your mistakes all by yourself too.

  Jory slowly unbent her legs and then stood up and peered out the bathroom window. Down below she could see Mrs. Kleinfelter slowly backing an ancient brown Ford truck out of her barn and into their driveway. Jory didn’t even know Mrs. Kleinfelter had a car. Grace was standing on their porch watching Mrs. K’s incremental progress. Obviously a conversation had taken place.

  Jory sighed and turned from the window and went down the stairs and out the front door to meet her fate.

  “That’s awfully kind of you,” Grace was saying as she squinted at Mrs. Kleinfelter.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I have a couple things of my own I need to get there.” Mrs. Kleinfelter waved any thoughts of imposition away.

  “Only if it’s no trouble.” Grace turned to Jory with a bright look. “Guess what? Mrs. Kleinfelter’s going downtown.”

  “Um-hm,” said Jory, in as noncommittal a way as she could muster.

  Mrs. Kleinfelter stood next to the pickup rooting around in something that looked like the kind of mailbag a pony express rider would have used.

  “Is that your purse?” Jory asked. “How cool.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter, looking down at the bag as if for the first time. “It’s an old army satchel of my husband’s. I think he carried photos in it.” She lifted the flap on the bag up and down. “I’m not a very pursey sort of person.”

  “Me either,” said Jory.

  “All right, then,” said Grace. She smiled encouragingly at the two of them. “We’ll see you two in a little bit.”

  Inside the truck it was very warm and smelled of dust and closed windows and Doublemint gum. Jory ran her hand over the car seat’s upholstery. It was stiffly scratchy.

  “Horsehair,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter and put the truck in reverse. She craned her neck and peered behind her as she backed out of the driveway and onto the main road. She inched her cautious way out onto the minimal traffic of the back roads of Arco. They passed the sugar beet factory and then a sign advertising the college. “Is that where your father works?”

  She nodded. “He teaches astronomy.”

  “Oh, the stars.” Mrs. Kleinfelter said this as if she were saying the word God.

  “The planets and moons and all that stuff.” Jory rolled the window down an inch or two and felt the wind blow through the sweaty pieces of her hair.

  “I can’t picture what that must be like—to know all those things about the sky and everything up there. All those things that are beyond us. Your father must be an awful smart man.”

  “Yes,” Jory said. “He knows everything.”

  The two of them rode along in silence for a while. Mrs. Kleinfelter drove on into the town, past the Toot ’N’ Tell and the Red Steer and Wretha’s Beauty Salon. She made two more careful turns and then pulled the truck into a parking lot. Jory stared up at the sign at the front of the store: SUPER THRIFT. She felt her heart beat faster.

  “Well, here we are.” Mrs. Kleinfelter turned off the truck’s ignition and turned to Jory. “Are you ready?”

  Jory sat unmoving in the passenger seat. “Is there another drugstore we could go to?” she said.

  “Well, there’s a Penny Wise somewhere over on the north side. It’s clear across town, though.” Mrs. Kleinfelter squinted in at Jory. “Why? Is there something wrong?”

  “Oh,” said Jory, in the same small voice, her usual creativity deserting her. “I don’t know . . . I’m just not sure I know where anything is in there.”

  Mrs. Kleinfelter shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. She cleared her throat and then lowered her voice. “Well, I think I can probably help you find whatever you need.”

  Jory’s face and neck grew hot. This was her own fault. Her own fault. Her own fault. She opened the truck’s door and stepped out into the brilliant sunshine of Idaho on a late September afternoon. Her heart hammered on, oblivious, healthy and strong, as she walked across the parking lot and through the familiar front door of Super Thrift Drug.

  Inside, the smell was exactly the same as before: the new plastic of wading pools and Hula-Hoops mixed with Listerine. The air was artificially cool and somewhere over or underneath it all Glen Campbell was sadly insisting that the Wichita lineman was still on the line. Jory tried to look everywhere and nowhere at once. Mrs. Kleinfelter was walking down one aisle after another with a quickness that made it difficult for Jory to stay safely glued to her shoulder. Mrs. Kleinfelter came to a sudden stop at the pharmacy counter.

  “Hello, Phil,” she said to the red-faced man behind the counter. She pushed her brown pill bottle across the counter. “Just my usual.”

  “Sure thing, Mrs. K.” The red-faced man tried to smile at Jory, but Jory refused to make eye contact with him; instead, sh
e tried to slouch nonchalantly behind Mrs. Kleinfelter while still glancing all around her. She saw several customers milling about and a female employee she didn’t recognize. Maybe the store had changed hands. Maybe all the old employees had quit and moved away. Maybe they had all died and gone directly to hell.

  “I don’t know why they insist on always keeping it fifty degrees in here.” Mrs. Kleinfelter craned her head around as if to locate the offending thermostat, or the “they” who were in charge of it. “It’s not as if they’re storing meat.”

  Jory smiled grimly.

  “I haven’t turned the air on in my house in ages. It’s actually just a swamp cooler. Henry insisted that real air conditioners gave him sinus infections.” Mrs. Kleinfelter picked a pair of reading glasses off a circular display stand and tried them on. She bent down and inspected herself in the display’s tiny mirror. “Oh, dear,” she said.

  The red-faced pharmacist slid the window on his glass enclosure open and leaned out. “All righty, then,” he said. “Here you go.” He handed a little white bag to Mrs. Kleinfelter, who was busy poking the reading glasses back into their slot. “Say, is this a granddaughter?” He smiled in Jory’s direction, revealing a row of teeth squarely curved and yellow as those of a horse.

  “Oh, my, no,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter. She took hold of Jory’s arm. “This is my neighbor girl, Jory.”

  “Well, she’s just as pretty as you, so you can understand my mistake.” The pharmacist winked.

  “Oh, Phil.” Mrs. Kleinfelter shook her finger at him and put the white bag in her purse. She turned around and began walking back through the store aisles in the same brisk fashion as before. “Why do men always think they need to remind you that they’re men?” she muttered. She shook her head and Jory trailed in her wake, trying to look casual, invisible.

  Mrs. Kleinfelter marched down one aisle and then another. Finally she stopped next to the large display of mysterious feminine products. Jory had scrutinized this amazing array surreptitiously many times in the past, but today she had no interest in theorizing what you did exactly with the multitudinous pads, creams, sprays, wipes, nozzled bottles, etc. that all promised discretion, secrecy, and security.