“You promised you wouldn’t call the police.” Jory’s words came out in a strangled choke. “You promised.”
Her father stared straight ahead. He said nothing and he didn’t even try to smile.
“He doesn’t need to go to jail!” Jory felt as if she were pleading with someone far more important than her father—with God, or a judge, someone who could repeal judgments or commute sentences.
This statement seemed to reanimate her father. “Jory, I don’t even know where to begin.” He stared at her as if trying to decide what to say. Finally, he held up his index finger. “Number one, he has a record. Ed Hewett says he was involved in some kind of bad drug-dealing business down in Texas. And number two, this is in addition to the fact that he was keeping your sister—who is a minor—at that house full of reprobates and runaways.”
Jory looked down at the cement step. “She went there herself.”
“We have no idea how she got there, Jory. And no matter what happened, no matter what went on, she is only seventeen years old. He is a grown-up male who knew exactly what he was doing.”
Jory had no response to this. She watched her own breath crystallizing in the air between them. “What will happen to him now?”
“I don’t know. They’re taking him to the county jail for the time being.”
Jory put her arms around her knees and then leaned her head down onto them.
“Jory,” he said firmly. “We did the right thing.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said into her knees.
“What?”
Jory raised her head and spoke more clearly. “Maybe we should have just let her go. Let them go.”
Her father breathed heavily in and out through his nose. “Sometimes in life we have to do things we don’t like to do. Hard things that don’t please everyone.”
“You’re pleased,” said Jory, deliberately turning her full gaze on him. “You’re glad the police came and took him away. You’re glad Grace is going.”
Her father did his best to look unperturbed by this comment. He rubbed his hands together and then blew into them to warm them. After a moment he folded his hands and clasped them between his knees, and then he turned his head and looked Jory in the eye. “You’re the one who told me he was coming here.”
Jory gave a tiny gasp. It felt oddly as if he, too, had slapped her. She bit the inside of her cheek with a swift deliberateness that surprised even her. A swirl of salty blood flooded her tongue.
Her father carefully reached out his arm and pulled her in close to him. She could feel the scratchy collar of her mother’s coat against her face and could smell the hint of Fleurs de Rocaille perfume that permeated it. Her eyes and throat began to fill. Her father hugged her even closer, as if trying to comfort her and restrain her at the same time. He patted and stroked her arm through the thickness of the coat and Jory buried her head in the hollow of his shoulder. She could hear his heart beating quiet and steady beneath her ear. It thumped on and on, never changing or slackening in its pace as she leaned into him.
After a minute or two, her father lifted his head and stared deliberately up at the evening sky. “Look at that,” he said. “Venus is clear over next to Mars.” He pointed so that Jory could see. “I’d forgotten they were going to line up this month. You know that’s what they think was going on the year Christ was born. That the star of Bethlehem was actually Venus, Jupiter, and Mars all in alignment.”
Jory righted herself on the step. She tried to wipe her nose on the scratchy nap of her mother’s coat sleeve. She gazed up briefly into the plummy violet of the darkening winter sky. “I don’t really care, Dad.”
She saw in the light that he looked infinitely sad. And then furious. And then finally sad again.
“I love him,” she said.
Her father made a noise somewhere deep in his throat and closed his eyes. He sounded not angry, but disgusted. Perhaps even embarrassed.
Jory sat silently on the step looking anywhere but at her father.
“Jory, look. I cannot stress this strongly enough.” Her father reached out and took her hand. He gripped her fingers between his own. “Listen to me, Jory.” He seemed suddenly determined to say her name as many times as possible. “This man is a criminal. He preys on young, inexperienced girls. And he tries to act like some kind of guru or Svengali or something, because his own life is so miserable that he has to find teenagers who’ll worship him to make himself feel better.” Her father had obviously given this subject some thought.
He was crushing her hand between both of his. “Do you understand this? Do you? Tell me you do.”
Jory tried to pull her hand out from between his, but he was stronger and held on.
He sighed audibly. “Someday, when you’re quite a bit older than you are now, this will all look different. This man will look very different to you. But for now, Jory, you’re just going to have to take my word for it—this man is no good. And his intentions—for you and your sister—are and were no good. They were worse than no good.” He blinked several times and then ran his hand through his hair. “And that,” he said, unfolding his long legs and standing wearily up from the step, “is the end of this discussion.”
Jory continued to sit on the step long after her father had gone inside. Her head felt empty and shaken, as if its contents—the ants or bees that had taken up residence there—were still humming, but at a lower-level frequency, a nighttime stupor. Too much had happened for her to even take in, and now, somewhere across town, Grip was in jail. And inside her house Grace was waiting for the morning, when their father would drive her and her old blue suitcase to the airport. Jory could not believe any of it, even though she had had a large hand in all of its unfolding. It was Saturday, November 21, she suddenly remembered, and she had started her first period. She was grown up now, with the heavy aching in her gut and the bloodstains on her pants to prove it.
Chapter Twenty
They didn’t find her right way.
In fact, the next morning, their father’s first thought was that Grace had taken off again, even though her suitcase and purse were still in her room, and so he had gone next door to the Hewetts’ to talk to the detective, to see what legal or investigative steps he should take now.
The hour for Sunday School and church came and went, but no one in the house mentioned this or made a move toward going. As the long afternoon wore on, her father had had to call the airline and cancel the plane ticket, but then that evening, after their mother had discovered that her pill bottle was missing, he finally gave in to their mother’s pleas and called the Arco police. Two men in tightly fitting navy blue uniforms, smelling like coffee and cigarette smoke, came and sat in their living room and talked to her parents, as Jory read book after book to Frances, who was sitting up very excitedly in her bed. The men searched the backyard and alley with flashlights and went through Grace’s dresser drawers and closet, but, still, it wasn’t until they looked in the garage and asked her father to lift the heavy door on the bomb shelter that they realized what had happened. Right beforehand, her father had said over and over that he didn’t see how Grace could have lifted the door by herself, that he had built it deliberately so that none of them but he could do it. He had made it that way on purpose, he’d said. He had made careful calculations in advance. Very careful, specific calculations that were scientifically accurate and sound.
Later, after the ambulance had left, Jory overheard one of the policemen remark to the other that perhaps Grace had grown some since her father had made those calculations. Either that, he said, or she had been very determined. Or maybe both, said the other policeman, who was younger and seemed bent on having the final word.
At the hospital, in the emergency room, Jory and Frances were made to wait out in the hallway while their mother and father met with the doctors. A few hours later, when Grace was moved into the critica
l care unit, Jory and Frances sat in a small beige-colored waiting room because only their parents were allowed to stay next to Grace’s bedside. Frances was too young—the rules said you had to be fourteen or older—so Jory was forced to stay in the family waiting room with her younger sister. Periodically, their father would come briefly out into the waiting room and sit on one of the green vinyl couches next to Jory. Frances would clamber onto his lap and the three of them would sit silently, as if waiting for a church service to begin. There were magazines in the waiting room and occasionally a few other very silently waiting, woebegone-looking people, and quite a bit more frequently nurses, whose white shoes squeaked across the waxed squares in the linoleum floor.
Without meaning to, Jory had now memorized the watermarks in the acoustic tile ceiling and the three paintings of pastel-colored boating scenes on the waiting room’s walls, and she had repeatedly and blankly observed the view from the waiting room’s one small window. The view was of the parking lot below, filled with only a few shiny-hooded cars and a lone flagpole that supported a periodically flapping American flag. Their mother refused to come back into the waiting room at all. She was sitting next to Grace’s bed, their father said, holding Grace’s hand and singing “Catch a Falling Star” and “Lollipops and Roses” and “When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver.” These, for inexplicable reasons, were Grace’s favorite childhood songs. “But why won’t she wake up?” Frances kept saying. “She’s slept all night long already.”
The next afternoon sometime, when a faint, nauseating smell of roast beef drifted up from the hospital cafeteria, Frances began very quietly to cry. She was sitting across from Jory on the other green vinyl couch and her head was down, but Jory could see Frances’s shoulders shaking. “What’s wrong?” Jory whispered across the room at her. Frances looked up.
“Nothing,” she said, sobbing a little.
Jory walked over to the couch and peered down at her. After a moment, Frances lifted up her car coat’s hem. Underneath, a large pool of liquid was spreading quickly across the shiny green of the couch. “I didn’t know where the bathroom was,” said Frances, gulping. “And I didn’t want Grace to wake up while I was gone.” She stared down at the couch as if it were partly to blame. Jory took her hand and tugged her off the couch and they walked down the tiled hall, with Frances taking wary peeks at the lone nurse sitting in the nurses’ station.
Inside the restroom, Jory locked the door and tugged off Frances’s coat and her corduroy pants and her underwear and rolled them hastily up into a ball, and after glancing around the room she stuffed the sodden mass into a metal garbage can with a swinging lid.
“That’s my Christmas coat,” Frances wailed, “and now I don’t have any underwear on.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jory. She took off her own short jacket and pulled it firmly around Frances, buttoning it and rolling up the sleeves. “See?” said Jory. The navy peacoat hung down considerably past Frances’s bare knees. Jory smoothed down the hem of the wool coat. “You’re all covered up now.”
Frances looked tearfully unconvinced. “But underneath my bottom is all bare,” she whispered. She shrank back against the bathroom wall and began breathing haphazardly in and out, in the way she did in times of great personal distress. “And you threw my red coat away.”
Jory took Frances by the shoulder and guided her into one of the stalls. She toed off her own mary janes and unsnapped and unzipped her own corduroy pants and shrugged out of both them and her day-of-the-week underwear. Frances stared with great fascination at the sanitary napkin and belt Jory was wearing. “What is that? That diaper . . . strap thing?” she asked. For a moment she seemed to have forgotten her perturbation at her own clothing situation.
“It’s nothing,” said Jory.
Frances looked stricken. “But what is it? Do you pee into it?”
“No, said Jory, “of course not. It’s just something girls have to wear sometimes when they get big.”
“Why?” said Frances.
“Just because,” said Jory. “Now be quiet.” She sat on the closed toilet lid and stood Frances in front of her, pulling her own panties up over Frances’s bare feet and legs and up to her rounded little belly.
“Put your hand on my shoulder,” she said, and Frances circled her small arm around Jory’s neck while Jory put Frances’s socks and shoes back on. “But if it’s just like sleeping, why doesn’t Dad just wake her up and put her in the car?” said Frances.
“Don’t start that again,” said Jory. She tied a tight bow in each of Frances’s shoes. She stood up and pulled her own pants back on, feeling vulnerable and naked without her underwear.
“But why did Grace go down into the bomb shelter to get into her coma?”
Jory gazed back into Frances’s brown eyes, which looked so much like their mother’s.
“Because she wanted to be alone,” Jory said. “She was feeling sad, and she wanted to change things—to make things different.” This was a thought that had come to Jory sometime late the night before when she had been sitting in the waiting room. That Grace had just been trying to change things. To fix things. To make things better. This rationalization was obviously easier to consider than its opposite: that Grace had wanted to strike back, to make things far worse, to make things forever and ever unfixable.
She and her sisters were all born in this same hospital. Rumor had it that when Frances was born, Jory had been too young to be allowed into the maternity ward, so she and Grace stood outside on that blustery March evening and gazed up at their mother, who was on the second floor and leaning out the window. This next event was something that their mother loved to retell, how Jory had yelled upward to her, “Are you still fat?” and how her mother had yelled back down, “Yes, but I’m not pregnant anymore, if that’s what you mean.” Jory had no memory of this: neither of the event nor of her participation in it.
They returned to the family waiting room. When the elevator at the end of the hall pinged sharply, Jory’s heart lurched and she hoped it was her father. But it was only a man in a suit and large gray overcoat who walked past them and down the long tiled hallway, his unbuttoned coat billowing slightly behind him. Surely someone would come and tell them something sometime soon. Surely there would be some kind of news, some new information that the doctors would give them. Where was their father and why hadn’t he come back?
That night, much later, after the waiting room window had grown dark and Frances had fallen asleep on the floor, still wearing her big sister’s coat, Jory lay on her side on the green plastic couch and rubbed her feet together, back and forth, back and forth, making endless bargainings with God. She would never go to another dance or listen to her transistor radio or worry about what her clothes looked like ever again. She would happily drop out of high school and never touch a drop of alcohol. She would cut off her hair, she would shave her head bald too, she would never make out with or even kiss a single boy or man. She would be the maid of honor at Grip and Grace’s wedding and she would never think of him as anything other than her brother-in-law—her sister’s husband. And she would do these things happily and without question, no matter how humiliating or hard, no matter how disgusting or unappealing or embarrassing. She would do all this and more. In fact, she would do anything, give up anything, anything at all, if only God would keep His part of the bargain. If only He would save Grace. Save her. Save her. Save her. The waiting room seemed to have a sort of humming noise coming from somewhere in its walls or ceiling. The elevator had quit pinging and the only noise now was the room’s strange low-pitched humming and the night nurse coughing quietly once in a while. The rest of the world, the part that was outside this building, made no sound at all.
Sometime in the very early morning, Jory woke up with a start to find her father sitting next to her and holding her sock foot. He was rubbing her foot and looking out into the empty waiting room, not making a sound. Jor
y leaned up on her elbows. “Where’re my shoes?” she said. Jory tried to sit up, but her father hung grimly on to her foot. “What is it?” she said. “What’s happened? Is she awake?” Her father kept rubbing the bottom of her foot, massaging the same small spot over and over through her sock, while still not looking at her. Jory wrenched her foot out of his hand. “Dad?” she said, beginning to cry. She held her hands up to her mouth and made a terrible gagging, retching sound. “Dad?” she said again, pleading now. He lifted his head finally and forced his eyes to meet hers.
And in that instant, she saw. She saw that everything she had once known or thought she had known had been lifted up and away, as lightly and easily as if it had never even been at all. “No,” she said, “NoNoNoNo.” and she clutched at his shirtfront, pulling at his pocket and ripping out its stitches, and then she was standing and a noise was rising up out of her and a nurse was hurrying toward them, her white rubber-bottomed shoes shrieking against the spotless tile. Jory thrashed and struggled against the stricture of her father’s arms and cried out in a voice that was new to her and in sounds unmusical, while her father told her softly that the wedding had come to pass while Jory had been dreaming, all unwatchful—the bridegroom had come for the wedding feast and had chosen his bride, but Jory had been asleep and had been caught unawares, Jory had foolishly let her lamp go out, her father said. She had slept, and the world had blinked its eye and all in a twinkling instant the door had been forever shut. Jory was now on the floor, clutching the knee portion of her father’s pant leg, but she could still hear his voice from up above, Then spake the Lord saying, Verily I say unto you, watch therefore, for no one knows the hour nor the day when the Son of Man cometh. No, Jory cried now, no, no! Lord, Lord, she begged, open unto me! But the Lord said, the door is shut tight against you, for you have been foolish, and I know you not.
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