Runaway Saint

by Lisa Samson

  “Because there is no body, yes, when they bring up the car? Some of our people, they make a little shrine so she is remembered. They want you to see it, so you will know that no one is forgetting her.”

  “A shrine for Belinda?” I ask, the photo quivering in my hand. It falls to the ground and Sergei bends to return it.

  “She was good lady,” he says. “And I know—listen to me, I know—she goes to Jesus. You remember that always, yes?”

  Sergei rises, but I am frozen in place. He draws a deep breath, gazes down at me, then smiles. “It is terrible, I know, but she … she finishes the race.”

  “You’re saying Aunt Bel is dead.”

  He bends down and kisses me on the forehead, an ancient gesture. My chair reclines slightly, my feet leaving the ground. I feel weightless and numb.

  “I am sorry. I would bring you something more of hers, but has nothing. And what she has, it is all swept away. Like she never existed, so we put up that cross. Like stake in the ground, to show her place.”

  He backs out of the cubicle, turning to go.

  This is bad. Very bad. Much worse than anything I imagined.

  What if he sees her on his way out?

  I rise from my chair, so unsteady on my legs that I could have been sitting for hours. As I start to follow him, Diana appears at my elbow. She’s been outside the cubicle, listening. Not that you’d need to be very close in order to overhear Sergei’s voice.

  “Did you hear that?” I whisper.

  She clutches my hand.

  “It’s pretty bad. They think she’s dead.”

  “Sara,” she says, leaning close to my ear. “Are you sure that’s the real Belinda? She could be some kind of impostor.”

  This makes me laugh. “Oh no. We’ve got the real Belinda. And from the sound of it, she’s a regular saint. Is she still hiding in the gallery? I want to see what she thinks about all this. Look at the picture. They’ve built her a shrine and everything. I wonder what he’d say if he knew. I wonder what he’d tell the people back home.”

  “I’m sure she has her reasons,” Diana says, her tone doubtful.

  “For faking her own death? I’m sure. Let’s go and find out.”

  The gallery is empty except for Aunt Bel’s painting on the wall, another monument to the work of a woman passing through.

  15.

  Good Taste, Less Fitting

  Aunt Bel’s doing it now, the nervous cleaning ritual. I have noticed this before. Coming home after a long day, the mess we left behind in the morning will be tidied away. All the dishes washed and back in the cupboard, the furniture moved back into alignment, a pine-fresh scent on the air, or maybe a scented candle burning on the mantel. Down in the basement, the dryer will be churning, or else the clothes will be folded and put away.

  I pause halfway down the basement steps, leaning down so I can see her moving a lump of wet clothes from the washer to the dryer.

  “Aunt Bel,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  Her back clearly says no, as does her inability to speak.

  “Can you come up here for a minute? We need to talk.”

  She nods curtly, continuing with her task.

  Her worktable is a composition of spilled paint and balled up or torn paper. There are some paints on the floor, an overturned jug of what looks—and smells—like solvent. A fit has been pitched, I think, imagining Aunt Bel trouncing her little studio in frustration. After a pause, I head upstairs.

  “I wish she wouldn’t feel the need to do all the chores,” I tell Finn. “She’s not the maid.”

  “If it bothers you so much, just tell her. But talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Plus, I think she likes it. She wants to be useful.”

  “I’m sure you think that, but trust me, nobody likes doing that stuff. She’s doing it because she feels bad, like she has to justify her presence here. So if you think about it, this is our fault for not making her comfortable.”

  “Your fault,” he says, cracking a smile. “Bel and me are good.”

  Accompanied by squeaks, Aunt Bel’s feet compress the treads as she walks up the stairs slowly, presenting herself in the living room like a naughty child who’s been caught. Taking a cue from her downcast expression, I motion her to a seat on the couch but remain standing over her. She smoothes her dress over her knees, clutching the hem in slim fingers, kneading the fabric within an inch of its life.

  “I talked to Sergei today,” I announce.

  “I’m sure you’re happy to finally know.” Her tones, soft and smooth, try to cover the mound of chagrin, to no avail.

  Finn shifts his weight, making the floorboards creak. He walks a few paces toward the kitchen, like he’s leaving, then pauses on the edge of the room. Available for peacekeeping, should it come to that, but also within earshot so he doesn’t miss anything that’s said. That makes me smile inside, the same way I smile when he makes fun of a girly reality show on TV and then sits down to watch it with me.

  “Listen, Aunt Bel, I think this is serious. Please explain things to me. Here, look at this.” I try to hand her the shrine photo, but her hands cling to her hem, forcing me to lay it on the couch cushion beside her. “Those people miss you so much, they’ve built a shrine for you. Do you think it’s right, letting them think that you’re …” For some reason, I can’t say the word dead out loud, so I let the silence hang in the air.

  Aunt Bel glances down at the photo without touching it.

  “You told me a lot,” I continue, “but you never explained who Sergei was, or why you didn’t want to see him. Now I know. The thing I can’t figure out is what purpose this … deception serves. What would be the harm in telling him the truth? He could go back and put a lot of people’s minds at ease. And then you wouldn’t have to carry the guilt either. I know there’s something eating away at you, and I think this is it.”

  I pause to let her speak. She doesn’t even look up. From the doorway, Finn gives me raised eyebrows and nothing more. This is your mess, he’s saying, and don’t think for one second that I’m jumping into it. I’ve been fine with letting things unfold naturally.

  “Aunt Bel, you need to talk to me. You lied to me about being in danger, and now I find out all of this. There’s been a huge breach of trust.”

  Without glancing up, Aunt Bel shrugs her broad shoulders in what I take to be an Eastern European way, a very expressive shrug, more a commentary on the bleakness of reality than any particular questions of mine.

  “Did you fake the car crash?” I ask her.

  A small snort of a laugh comes out. She shakes it off, running a hand down the side of her face, as if she’s checking for fever. “That was real,” she says. “All too real. The water rushing in was so cold I couldn’t breathe, like a fist of ice closing around me.” She extends her badly mended arm, rotating the limb until it won’t go any farther. The white bandage around her braced pinkie appears dingy in the lamplight. “I did this trying to get the door open. The pain, I think, is what revived me. Otherwise it would have been easy just to shut my eyes and let it take me.”

  I walk over to an armchair and sit down. What do you say to a revelation like that? Across the room, Finn stifles a cough with his hand, then goes into the kitchen to pour a glass of water, which he brings to Aunt Bel, hovering over her with the glass extended until she finally accepts it. Instead of drinking, though, she sets the glass down next to her feet.

  “Why let them think you were dead?” I ask.

  “I didn’t let them do anything. When I crawled out of the river, I had to pull myself up with only one arm. I was frozen to the bone. Exhausted. I thought maybe I would die. But if I didn’t, I told myself, this is enough. Just like that. This is enough. After this, I am leaving.”

  “When was this?” Finn asks. “I always assumed you came straight back to the States, but that arm would’ve taken awhile to heal.”

  “Last winter. I didn’t think at first to come home. I stayed with some friends, a couple
of missionaries in Romania. Near Varna, with a view of the sea.” This jogs a memory: my mother said she’d received a postcard from Aunt Bel, sent from Romania. “I thought at first I would stay there. But some kids came, college students from America on a missions trip. They made me feel very old, but also homesick. I decided to come back.”

  “And all this time,” I say, “you never let the people in Kazakhstan know where you were? You could have said something. Sent a postcard.”

  “I never made a secret of leaving. The secret made itself. I never knew until later.”

  “But it was a safe assumption that when they fished your car out and you weren’t in it—”

  “It wasn’t between me and them,” she says. “It was between me and God.”

  The way she pronounces the word God is funny, with that same swallowed syllable as when she first said Uralsk. I don’t like it any more on her tongue than I do in my own brain. Does she feel the same way about God that I do? After what she’s been through, maybe she thinks he’s even more capricious and mean-spirited than my Sunday school teacher let on.

  “It’s not too late to let Sergei know the truth. I’m sure we could track him down at this conference of his in D.C., let him know what really happened.”

  “Do what you want,” she says.

  “I think you should do it.”

  She shrugs. “I’m done with that place. May I be excused?”

  Just like that.

  “Nobody’s chaining you to your seat, Aunt Bel.”

  She heads up to her room and I follow Finn into the kitchen. As I begin filing cucumber slices into my mouth while Finn forms hamburger patties for the grill, I say, “So much for dangerous. I mean, thank God, but I’m not sure whether or not to be relieved Sergei isn’t a criminal or upset that she lied.”

  “How about both? But just don’t hang on to the second feeling for a minute longer than you have to.” He rinses his hands, then grabs the plate of burgers. He turns at the door, “Right?”

  I nod.

  “Why don’t you get changed, grab a beer, and sit with your he-man while he grills your meat?”

  “Okay.”

  I pad barefoot down to the basement to retrieve my favorite shirt. The whirlwind did more damage to Aunt Bel’s art supplies than I could appreciate from halfway up the stairs. The contents of the table are scattered across the floor as if she’d swept them off in a fury. There’s the mop, tilted against the table, its straggly gray head now speckled and matted with paint. On the floor, I can see the lines where she pushed the mop along, skimming the paint and the thinner and some shards of broken glass into a pile near the easel. I have to step carefully to avoid the mess.

  The basket where the dirty clothes are usually heaped lies empty on its side, the bottom glistening with spilled paint. What a disaster. Hopefully the basket wasn’t full when this violence was done. The dryer is still churning, so I bend down and open the washer, peering into its steely insides. Nothing but the smell of summer fresh detergent. I lift the dryer door, cutting off the cycle, touching to feel whether the clothes are still damp. They feel crispy and done.

  I dig through them for the familiar softness, the spongy gray cotton of my favorite shirt, yanking it out from the twist of clothes by one of the sleeves. But something is wrong. A streak of lightness against the gray cotton. Instead of pulling the shirt over my head, I hold it out for inspection. The front is fine, but the back is marred by bleach-like stains, two long slices like rays of sunlight across the gloom, one of them overlapping the first letters in the words GOOD TASTE. Whatever the chemical was—thinner or solvent or paint—it was strong enough not just to discolor the fabric but to burn off the letters. The G and the O cling to the cotton only in flakes, peeling sunburned skin that chips away when I rub my finger over the fabric.

  A voice in my head starts rehearsing every ugly word I’ve ever heard before, stringing them all together in a vile cacophony, a depraved and glorious monologue I won’t even try to repeat. My GOOD TASTE is reduced to OD TASTE now, my favorite shirt, soft and beautiful and now destroyed. As if the hole on the hip wasn’t bad enough, now the wide discolored streaks are hard to the touch and unsightly. And they have turned the sentiment into a joke.

  I ball the shirt up in one fist and take the stairs two at a time.

  “Aunt Beeeeelllll!” I cry. And anger overtakes me further.

  She’s sitting like a gargoyle on the front steps, her heels tucked against the concrete, hunched over her cancer stick. When I burst through the door, she uncoils herself, looking up in surprise, the cigarette clutched in her right hand.

  “Look at this! Look what you’ve done!” I cock my arm back and throw the wadded shirt at her. It whooshes past her face and clips the cigarette from her hand, sending it teetering into the night. The shirt smacks into her lap, then slinks over the side of her thigh onto the concrete.

  How could she just up and leave like that? Those poor people. They didn’t know. And my family? She up and left us too. She disappeared when I needed her. Because I did. Because I remember sitting in her lap crying and crying and she was the only one around to comfort me. “And then you were gone!” I cry. “You were gone!”

  For an instant, frozen in shock, Aunt Bel stares at me wide-eyed, like a startled child. Then she starts to say something. Before she can get out a word, I turn on my heel and stomp back into the house, banging the door shut behind me. Up the stairs, I slam the bedroom door, the airflow hitting my back as tears escape my eyelids. I fling myself onto the bed and will myself not to get hysterical.

  The house is quiet. From the bed, with my face buried in a pillow, I hear Finn’s footsteps coming up the steps.

  “Is everything all right?” his voice calls.

  The house answers with silence.

  16.

  Far Away, So Close

  I am already awake when Finn gets up the next morning, but I pretend otherwise and let him get dressed and go downstairs without me saying a word. The house is quiet enough that I can hear his morning ritual, even from upstairs. The buzz of the coffee grinder. The kettle boiling. The hum of baritone voices on the radio news.

  Ignoring all this, I gaze up at the cracks in the ceiling, which begin to resemble a map of foreign lands, craggy ridge lines intersecting wide stretches of pampas, a sun-cast shadow undulating like a river through imagined geography. And I find myself after a sleepless night looking up into this map and willing myself to visit there, trying on Aunt Bel’s life over my own, leaving everything behind for the unknown, and maybe chucking that too once enough time has passed for everything familiar to become foreign to my eyes.

  Finn sets down a mug of coffee on my nightstand and sits down wearily, his weight indenting the mattress and tilting me toward him.

  “She’s gone,” he says.

  I sit up in bed. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

  “Bel isn’t here. I had a bad feeling about last night, and sure enough, there’s no sign of her now. The room’s cleared out across the hall. She must have left early this morning, or late last night. Did you hear anything?”

  “Not a thing,” I say. “And I tossed and turned half the night. I think I would have heard if she’d made any noise.”

  “Well, she’s gone.”

  He kisses me on the head and leaves the room, depositing a melancholy miasma in his wake. I throw the covers back, test the cold floorboards with my bare toes. The reality still won’t sink in. I walk across the hall, pushing the half-open door wide, confirming with a glance that everything Finn said is indeed so. The pictures are missing from the dresser, the closet mourning the hanging clothes and Aunt Bel’s duffel bag.

  All night I watched myself, over and over like a gif file, throwing my T-shirt in her face.

  Throwing my T-shirt in her face.

  Throwing my T-shirt in her face, and how could I have done such a thing?

  GOOD TASTE. How about GOOD MANNERS? How about not being such a spoiled brat? How about
blaming everybody else for my unhappiness but myself? Well, at least I haven’t blamed God yet like the rest of the world as if they actually expect him to come to the rescue.

  Why everybody is still around me is now a mystery.

  Well, except for Aunt Bel. And I don’t blame her for going. The same person who escaped a sinking car in freezing waters and simply walked away to make a new life would realize she didn’t have to take the kind of disrespect I was handing out.

  Downstairs, I hunt around in case she left a note. Nothing. It would have been polite to leave some kind of message behind. When you’re running away, that is.

  Stop it, Sara.

  In the kitchen, Finn plates a pair of overcooked omelets, then kisses me on the head again. He steps back, looking at the ruined shirt I’m wearing. When he came to our room last night, without explanation he had tossed it to my side of the bed, and I’d slipped it on.

  “It’s not so bad,” he says.

  I sit at the kitchen table, the chair cool against the back of my bare thighs. I pull the shirt down my legs, stretching the fabric, and remember the way Aunt Bel would hug Katya’s sweater against her skin. The same thing has happened to my favorite shirt. She’s put her mark on it, and now I feel the soft cotton against my skin and I think of her.

  “Where do you think she’s gone?” I ask.

  Finn shrugs. “She did leave this.”

  I look up, expecting him to produce a note, but instead he places a small box on the table. The box from the bank. Inside, there’s a stack of checkbooks that go with the account where my father deposited the money he asked me to give Aunt Bel. I lift the lid to find the ATM card resting on top of the stack. Although he’d requested that I come up with some kind of story, in the end I couldn’t think of any way to explain to my aunt where eight thousand dollars might come from out of the blue, so I told her it was from my dad and that he didn’t want her to know.