The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  “She always did just exactly what she pleased. No one ever controlled her for even a minute.” He laughed suddenly, a strange barking laugh that softened just a little toward the end. He was silent for a moment and Jory thought maybe he was done, that that was all they were ever going to say on the subject, but then he started again. “When Grace was just tiny,” he said, “before you were even born, a man came by our house leading a Shetland pony and Grace got so excited that I asked the man if she could sit on the horse for a minute and he said sure and so I lifted her onto this pony’s back and she was so thrilled and entranced that she started to shiver. I had to stand there and hold her on that horse’s back for about ten minutes while I tried to engage this old farmer in conversation so that he wouldn’t want to take off. But finally he had to move on, so I lifted Grace off the pony and she screamed so loudly and kicked me so furiously that even the old farmer looked genuinely worried. I took her into the house, but it didn’t do any good, she screamed and flailed wildly enough that she scratched up her own face and your mother’s too. She even took out a small patch of her own hair. This went on for about an hour or two before we finally had to call Dr. Henry and he came out to the house and gave her a shot. Dr. Henry tried to laugh it off, asking Esther if she had any tiger blood in the family, but I knew then and there that things were not going to go easily with Grace.”

  Jory had never heard this story before.

  “When she was little she hated taking off her clothes at night. Hated it. She threw such fits that Esther and I finally gave in and simply let her sleep in whatever she’d been wearing that day, shoes and all.” Her father laughed softly. “One night I got the idea that this had gone on long enough, so I literally held her down on the floor and stripped off her clothes and tried to stuff her into her pajamas.” Her father shook his head. “She kicked me so hard I was bruised for weeks. And the most amazing part was what she said afterward. She looked at me with those eyes of hers—those eyes that saw right through to whatever was most weak and false in you—and said, ‘If you knew how much I hated you, you’d hate me, too.’ ”

  Jory stared at her father.

  “And she was only four years old.”

  “Grip said that she was more brave than the rest of us. That her life was harder than ours.”

  Jory could tell that her father had already reached the end of his willingness to hear about Grip’s thoughts, but she hazarded one more comment. “He said that I was more like him—that we were more weak and selfish.”

  Her father leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “There are different kinds of bravery. And selfishness.”

  The streetlight on the corner winked on with a small, almost imperceptible hum. Almost immediately several moths swirled upward, as if drawn magnetically into its cone of light. Jory watched their futile flutterings.

  “Jory,” her father said in a voice so quiet she could barely hear it. “I need you to stay with me.” She could hear him making some sound now in his throat. Perhaps he was merely swallowing. “Please.”

  Jory felt something close to shock. She held perfectly still, and it was as if her heart and breath and blood had stopped. In the silence, Jory thought she could hear a moth’s wings battening against the searing heat of the streetlight bulb. It would be like flying into the sun, she thought. Like turning your face into the brightest, whitest, most brilliant light. Like deliberately diving into a beautiful, self-obliterating pool of fire.

  Would that be such a terrible and foolish trade: a moment’s pure and incandescent joy in exchange for an eternity of darkest nothingness? She closed her eyes tight and tighter, and for almost a second allowed herself to imagine that she still knew how to pray.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  On the drive home from the Greyhound bus station, Jory’s father said nothing, but when he parked the Buick in the driveway he braked too late and ran into the front of the garage, completely splintering one panel of the wooden door. For a second afterward, he and Jory merely sat in the car, the two of them silently registering the slight concussive feeling of having smacked into something so solid. Then her father got out of the car and trudged toward the front door without even looking at the damage. Jory, too, simply followed her father inside the house. She watched as he walked through the kitchen and into the interior of the garage, where he took a pair of bolt cutters and cut the two locks on the bomb shelter’s door that he had placed there back in November, as if to symbolically undo what had already occurred there. Then he went down below.

  In the past—the distant past—her father had gone down to the bomb shelter only on weekend evenings, or maybe when he was bored or needed to escape momentarily from the sheer number of females in the household, but now he seemed to want to live there, enclosed by the windowless walls and his headphones, his vision and hearing narrowed and focused to a manageable limit. Now he spent most evenings shut down there, listening to his ham radio and speaking softly to people in faraway countries, leaning forward and carefully turning one of the dials on his ham radio receiver, his head cocked as if listening for some vital signals from a distant planet.

  All of April had gone by in pretty much this fashion, her father finding out each day how the weather was in Heidelberg and Hamburg and Tlaquepaque. And now May was beginning to creep past without her mother returning or her father going back to his teaching job at the college. Back in November, he had asked for two months bereavement leave, but now, Jory knew, it had been more than five.

  Plus, for reasons that made no sense at all, he wouldn’t let her go back to school. He needed her here at home, he said. Which was somewhat absurd since he spent all his time entombed in the bomb shelter, while Jory sat on the couch and read and reread every book from the several bookcases in their house. Each evening she tried to make something that resembled a dinner, tuna salad on toast or spaghetti from a can, and each evening the two of them would sit at the dining table and try to eat this food and try to find something to talk about. Then her father would slink back to the garage and to his friends from foreign lands, and Jory would be left alone, staring at the blue princess phone sitting silently in its little cutout alcove in the wall.

  One night, Jory pulled the phone book up onto the table again and opened it to the inside of the front cover. A note was taped here with Important Phone #s inscribed in blue ink in her father’s firm printing. The numbers that followed were to be used only in emergency situations. With only a moment’s hesitation, she dialed the numeral 1 and the long number that followed it. After several rings during which Jory’s heart continued to thud, her aunt Annette said hello in a voice that sounded both cheery and unbothered until she realized who it was on the other end. “JoryAnne,” her aunt said then, her voice sounding like Jory’s mother’s, but without the same undertone of sadness and disapproval. “Your mom is taking a little nap out by the pool. Do you want me to wake her up?”

  Jory thought about this. “No,” she said. “I guess not. Is Frances around?”

  “Well, sure, honey. I’ll get her.” Her aunt’s voice took on a note of concern. “How’re you doing there? With your dad and all?”

  “Oh, just fine,” said Jory. “Dad and I were actually getting ready to go running in a few minutes. We just bought some new jogging shoes and now we’re going to go try them out.” This was a lie. Jory had tried and failed yet again today to get her father to even leave the house.

  “That’s wonderful! What else have you been up to? Has Oren gone back to teaching yet?”

  “He starts tomorrow,” said Jory. This was also untrue.

  “That’s terrific! Well, tell him hello from me—and, Jory, if you ever need anything, you know you can just call, right?” Her aunt cleared her throat and lowered her voice slightly. “Your mom is finally getting the rest she needs—thank goodness. And you should see her tan! You’d hardly recognize her. She was just a ghost when she got off that bus. I mean
it—she looked like one of those pictures of women from the TB camps. I took her straight to my doctor and he gave her a shot of vitamin B12 and he said plenty of sun and plenty of rest, and absolutely no stress, so that’s what we’re doing—just following doctor’s orders.” Her aunt seemed to have suddenly run out of steam. “Oh, and here’s your little sister,” she said, a trifle breathlessly.

  There was a moment or two of silence, and then Frances’s voice peeped up and into Jory’s ear. “Hello?” her sister said, and Jory could feel tears immediately gathering where there had been none only a moment before.

  “Hey, Franny,” said Jory, trying to steady her voice. “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m blowing up my swimming tube. It’s a sea monster like Beany and Cecil, Aunt Annette bought it for me, and the pool has a heater in it so you can swim anytime, even after dinner.” Frances sounded very excited. “I got some sandals too, they’re called huaraches, and I’m even going to wear them to school.”

  “To school?”

  “I’m going to go to Parkview Elementary. It’s only one block away and they have palm trees and a tire swing and some of the girls are Japanese.”

  “What do you mean? You’re going to school there?”

  “Not till next week. We have to get my school supplies first. I have young Mrs. Moto for my teacher.”

  “What?” Jory could now hear her aunt saying something in the distance. Something corrective sounding. Jory could hear Frances having a quick consultation with her aunt.

  “Mrs. Ya-ma-moto. Mrs. Yamamoto is my teacher.”

  “Frances,” said Jory. “How is Mom—is she okay?”

  “She’s all right.” There was a moment’s silence. “She still sleeps a lot. But she swims in the pool sometimes and we’re looking for apartments that are close to the beach and take pets, ’cause we’re going to get a canary. Remember Mr. Sunny?”

  “Frances, you need to come back. Dad and I need you and Mom to come back.”

  There was another silence.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “But I’m learning to swim,” said Frances.

  Jory could hear her aunt saying something in the background.

  “And I get to wear shorts to school and there’s a tire swing that everyone takes turns on.”

  Jory could hear Frances’s voice growing suddenly fainter and then her aunt was on the phone. “Jory, doll, I’ll have your mom call you back in a little bit, okay? Just as soon as she wakes up and eats some dinner, all right? We’re having taco salad tonight and it’s your mom’s favorite, so I’ve got to run right now and get some avocados down at Vons, but we’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Yes,” said Jory. “Okay, sure. Good-bye.” And then she hung up the phone.

  She sat in the chair next to the dining room table with her hand still on the telephone’s receiver. She held her hand there on the phone’s smooth pale blue plastic, feeling its unblemished smoothness. It was such a terrible and unimportant thing. She put her hands in her lap and tried to make her mind be filled with nothing. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair and then plugged both of her ears with her fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could. It was sort of like being underwater—the slightly shifting light source and the softly muffled sound of her own blood beating in her veins.

  She took her fingers out of her ears and that was when she heard it—the sound of a tinkling kind of carnival music. Without hesitating or bothering to think, she stood up and raced toward the front door, shoved it open, and then stood in the front yard for a moment, listening. The music seemed to be coming from a few blocks down the street, its familiar tune winding into her heart as seamlessly as a snake coiling up a smooth young tree.

  She began striding awkwardly down the block in the direction of the music, her heart keeping time with her strides. She was half jogging as she passed the Newmans’ and the Lockeys’ and the Reisensteins’ and then the houses on the next block that belonged to people whose last names she didn’t know. The neighborhood seemed to shimmer in the early evening air and a car in a driveway glinted in the low-slanting sunlight, as did someone’s metal mailbox and the waxy leaves on a low hedge of holly bushes. The tiny edges of each plant and the bark on tree trunks—all of it was as specific and individual as if she were seeing it all through a type of magnifying, illuminating, beautifying glass. The cracks in the sidewalk, the amazing bits of multifaceted gravel! Her heart and blood and vision and everything that made up her body was operating at a new, higher, more perfect level. It was as if she had been sick, very sick, and now suddenly, at a moment’s notice, she was well.

  At the corner right before the little grassy parcel of land called God’s Park, she stopped and tried to catch her breath. The ice cream truck was parked next to the curb, its music still going. Grip was sitting in the grass, just as he had been that night he had held her hand and they had first talked about Grace. Jory could feel her features rearranging themselves into one anxious configuration after another as the many things inside her collided and spread outward across her face. With a bravery born out of pure need, she took the final steps forward, then sat down in the grass and gazed at him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  He looked exactly the same, even though his hair had been cut conventionally short. How could she have thought that she’d forgotten a single aspect of his face, his dog-colored eyes, the slight dimple in his chin where no hair grew? She tried to slow her breathing and look away casually as he stood up, brushed off his pants, and then stepped up into the truck and turned its loudspeaker off. The music wound down and died away. Grip jumped back out of the truck and sat down on the ground a few inches closer to her than before.

  “How are you?” he asked. He looked at her and she couldn’t believe how long she had gone without being looked at in this very specific, particular way. By him.

  She shrugged helplessly. She couldn’t possibly explain anything from the last six months, plus the corners of her mouth kept tugging upward in a way that was beyond her control. She had thought she would never see him again. “When did you get out?” she said.

  “A few days ago.”

  “You still have your truck.” She realized that this made no sense and that she was just saying anything that came to her. She examined him while trying not to look like that was what she was doing. He was thinner maybe, and his hair looked so strange cut short—just like anyone else’s. He was wearing an orange T-shirt that she remembered from before and a pair of baggy corduroy pants that she didn’t. She couldn’t believe that even after everything that had happened, she still felt the exact same wondrous airy weightlessness in her head that she always did whenever he was next to her. Of all the many things that had changed, this was the one that hadn’t.

  “Your hair’s longer,” he said to her, picking up a strand of it and rubbing the ends of it between his fingers.

  “Yours isn’t.”

  “Regulation standards, ma’am,” he said. “County jail rules. No longer than the shirt collar.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Are you?” He seemed reluctant to let go of her strand of hair.

  Jory still couldn’t decide how to answer this. “I’m alive,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Where is she?”

  Jory squinted up at him. For a second she wasn’t quite sure what he meant. She looked down at the blades of grass between her feet. At her still moccasined feet. “She’s nowhere. She’s in a blue vase—an urn. She was supposed to be buried next to my grandparents, but my dad wouldn’t do it. He put her in our bomb shelter, I think. He hid her away somewhere. Hid it, I mean.”

  Grip wore a sudden pained expression. “He had her cremated?”

  Jory looked confused. “I don’t think it was just his idea.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “I don�
�t know—does it even matter?” Jory felt a small pang of annoyance and was also hurt for reasons she didn’t want to examine.

  “I guess it doesn’t.”

  Jory smoothed down the nap on one of her moccasins. The suede was darker in color than when he’d given them to her and even stained in some spots. Grip’s feet were bare. She surreptitiously examined the curly red hairs that fanned delicately across the tops of his naked toes.

  “I was sitting there in my cell drinking coffee out of my no-handled cup and I saw this little article on page three of the Arcade. I almost didn’t read it.” He paused. “They didn’t use her name, but I knew in my gut it was her.”

  Jory pulled her knees up to her chest. Her heart was still beating at a rapid rate. She felt sick almost, thrilled and nervous and wonderful and sick just from looking at him and hearing him speak.

  “What happened?”

  Jory knew what he was asking. “She took my mom’s pills,” she said. This was the first time she had ever talked about this with anyone and the words felt odd in her mouth. Illicit almost. “And then she shut herself in the bomb shelter. My dad found her.”

  Grip was watching her as she spoke. She could see him picturing these events in his head. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and put his face in his hands. Jory could barely hear what he was muttering, but she knew it was bad. He lifted his head. “Did she leave a note? Did she say anything to you beforehand?”

  “She beat me up pretty bad for telling my dad you were coming.” Jory could feel herself starting to smile. “She hit me hard.” For some reason this fact still pleased her. “I don’t know if she wrote a note or anything. My dad wouldn’t let anyone go down there afterward. Maybe he hid it.” She shrugged.

  “I still can’t believe this,” he said. “While I was in there it didn’t quite seem real, you know? I kept thinking that there was still a chance it was all a mistake.”

  Jory didn’t respond to this. She felt oddly envious of even his temporary disbelief.