“Not a silent prayer.” Dan’s voice awakened me.
I opened my eyes, relieved to find the plastic plates lying quietly in front of me.
“Dear God...” I closed my eyes again, grateful that I did not return to that quivering white cloth. “Bless this food. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Dan. I wouldn’t look at Cathy, but I could tell she was staring at me. I’m sure that I did not sound like Jenny when I prayed.
Pizza was luscious. I chewed intently, studying every flavor, inspecting the piece in my hand, trying to understand the spices. It was like a recipe for catsup but more peppery and less sweet. A memory of watching a hunk of brown sugar dissolve in a pot of stewing tomatoes fled as Cathy spoke.
“Choose letters.”
I chose seven squares, perching them in a row on the little wooden pew of my Scrabble rack. Dan checked his watch while Cathy folded over the top sheet of a small tablet of paper. As I tasted root beer for the first time, I must’ve made a surprised sound, for they both turned to me. I relaxed as the burning in my mouth tingled away and left a sweet flavor like anise and vanilla.
“Like ginger beer,” I smiled. “I like it.”
“Beer?” Cathy frowned at me. “What did you say?”
“She’s kidding,” said Dan.
I preferred the pizza to the game, but I played my turns without rousing suspicion. The phone rang, and when Cathy went to the little table by the couch, Dan paused, watching her.
“Hello?” Cathy hesitated with the phone to her ear. “I can’t hear you. I’m hanging up.”
She returned to the table. “I hate that.”
“Wrong number?” asked Dan.
“Dead air.” Cathy sat down. “Should I star sixty-nine?”
“No,” he said. “If they call back, I’ll get it.”
She looked at him.
“In case it’s an obscene phone call,” he added.
The phone rang again, and Dan got up. “Yes?” he said, with the receiver to his ear. “Steve. Did you just call?” He paused. “Must’ve been a wrong number. What’s up?” He listened. “Okay. That sounds good.” Another pause. “In about half an hour or forty-five minutes.”
Cathy fiddled with her letters.
“I’ll try,” he said, turning his back on us. “I know. I feel that way too. Don’t worry.” The hush in his voice made Cathy stop and listen. “Everything will work out. See you soon.” He hung up and came back to the table without glancing at Cathy, who was watching him.
“You didn’t draw,” Cathy reminded him.
He took three letters. There was an unnatural stillness in the room as if the air had been shut off.
The game went on in near silence until Dan used his last letters to make the word run. There were no more tiles to choose.
“Daddy won,” said Cathy, circling the score under his name.
Dan shrugged. “Game of luck.” He picked up the pizza box and the bottle of soda. “I’d better be going.” Before leaving the room, he bent to where Cathy still sat picking up the game pieces and kissed her cheek. “Count your blessings,” he said, quietly. She looked like she was feeling the lack of air, too.
“I know,” she whispered. He breezed out of the room as if he had all the air in the heavens. I helped Cathy put away the game and clear up the plates and cups.
“How about a work night?” she asked. “We could sit together like when you were little, and I could do the bills while you do homework.” She paused. “I forgot, you already did your homework.”
I would much rather have hidden in my room or sneaked off to telephone Billy’s house, but thoughts of James inspired me to benevolence.
“I have reading to do.”
I will make a promise to God, I decided. I will try to be as kind to Cathy as James was to Mitch. This was my vow—to be a friend to Jenny’s mother.
I brought a book, and Cathy brought a box covered in brown-and-cream colored paper bearing the label bills. She read figures from statements and invoices and checked them for accuracy. With birdlike care, she nested the little slips into piles, pecking at a tiny adding machine with her pen, scratching notes in the little margins. This was good, I thought. We were passing an evening in pleasant company, as I might have done with my Saint.
I sat across from her and, although it was almost impossible not to think about James, I read silently from Jane Eyre, skipping forward to her arrival at Thornfield. It was a completely liberating experience to be able to turn pages at will. It had been very frustrating, while Light, to be unable to read farther than my host would feel inclined to. How many times Mr. Brown had closed a book just when I wanted to start the next chapter. Now I was stopped only by Cathy’s sound of dismay.
“What in the world?” She stared at a slip of paper, then went to the phone and dialed. After a pause she said, “It’s me. Where are you?” She hung up and returned to the table, even more vexed. Since she didn’t look up at me, I went back to Jane and Mr. Rochester. A minute later, the phone rang.
“Hello?” She listened. “Where are you?” And then, “Why didn’t you pick up?” She twisted the cord. “I’m confused,” she said. “We have two gas receipts for Saturday. One for yours and one for mine.” She listened. “But you said you ran out of gas on Sunday.” She listened and I was watching her, realizing that she was talking about the day I had gone into Jenny’s body.
“How could the receipt be wrong? It comes out of a computer.” She paused, crumpling the slip in her fist. “I’m saying I don’t understand. No, I didn’t say that.” She paused. “I’m not saying that.” As she listened, her head came down lower and lower on her chest until she was staring down at her fist. “All right,” she said finally. “I know.” She hung up without saying goodbye and returned to the table, scooting in her chair and smoothing the wrinkles out of the gas receipt.
“What are you reading?” she asked, her face both flushed and pale.
“Jane Eyre” I said.
She put the receipts away with a trembling hand. As she stood with the box under one arm, she said, “Back in a tick.”
I had to keep myself from going to the phone when she left the room. The idea that I could be hearing James’s voice in a matter of seconds hurt me, but a moment later, Cathy was back with a sewing basket and a shirt over one arm. She moved from the seat she had chosen across from me to the seat beside me where the light was better. The shirt she unfolded must’ve been Dan’s. It was white with long sleeves. There was a button missing, the fourth one down.
First, Cathy took out a small box and opened it. There was a treasure trove of buttons inside, every size, color, and shape. She fished out a few small white ones, holding them up to the other buttons on the shirt until she found a close enough match. Next she took a pin and deftly extracted the little bits of thread left over from the button that was gone. Here was one thing that had changed little since my death. Needle and thread. I felt suddenly homesick. My male hosts had not mended their own clothes very often, but Cathy’s slim wrist as she drew back a stitch reminded me of my Saint.
I watched her from the corner of my eye, though my face was still bent to my book. Now she stopped and stared at the shirt. She pulled on the fabric surrounding the place where she was sewing on the new button. Was the shirt stretched there just a little, as if it had been torn off him in haste, or was that my imagination? She felt the buttons below and above, to see how loose they were. They were a little loose. Then she did what I had just been thinking I would do myself. She smelled it and, I know it couldn’t have been real, but I thought a faint scent of gardenias lifted from the fabric. She wasn’t sniffing to see whether the shirt was clean. I believe that she would have started under the sleeves if this were the case. No, she breathed in the collar of the shirt, blinked at it for a moment, then gave it a hard shake as if dismissing the thought. She retrieved the dangling needle and continued to sew the new button in place.
“What’s happening in your story?” she asked
after a few stitches.
“Jane is starting to fall in love with the master of the house.”
She nodded as if having read a dozen Harlequin novels in her youth meant she had heard it all.
“Shall I read out loud?” I offered.
Cathy smiled. “My grandmother used to have me read out loud while she was quilting.”
I took this as a yes and began to read. “‘Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mister Rochester presently. I was absorbed, sir, yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’ This is not saying much,’” I read. “‘Your pleasures, by your own account, have been few.’” I glanced at Cathy to see if she was interested, but I couldn’t tell. Her placid expression was fixed on her mending. “‘But I daresay,’” I continued, “‘You did exist in a kind of artist’s dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did you sit at them long each day?’”
Cathy sighed, and I believe I could have slipped into a Byron poem or a Shakespearean soliloquy and she wouldn’t have noticed.
“I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation,’” I read. And to test my theory, I let a few pages turn by themselves, and I jumped in without worrying whether it would fit together. “I have the right to get pleasure out of life, and I will get it, cost what it may’ ‘Then you will degenerate still more, sir.’ ‘Possibly, yet why should I, if I can get sweet fresh pleasure? And I may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee gathers on the moor.’” Now Cathy stopped in midstitch, listening without turning to me. “‘It will sting, it will taste bitter, sir.’ ‘How do you know? You never tried it.’”
At this, Cathy looked at me, so I ceased my reading and looked back at her, peering out from under my bowed head.
I tried a few more words. “‘How very serious, how very solemn you look,’” I read. “‘And you are as ignorant of the matter as this cameo head—”’
“I think that’s enough reading for tonight,” Cathy smiled politely. “I have a little headache.” Primly she snipped her thread, packed her mending, and stood. “I’ll come tuck you in later.”
I watched her walk out, I listened to the soft hiss of her shifting clothes as she moved down the hall, I waited for the click of her bedroom door as it closed, and then I shut my book and crept like a thief to the phone beside the couch. I was so relieved when James answered himself.
“Are you alone?” I asked.
“Not quite,” he said. There was a clack and rustle as he moved the phone into another spot. “Now I am,” he told me. “Have any adventures?”
I was about to tell him of the hidden pictures, but I froze at the sound of Cathy’s shower switching on.
“I’m in trouble again,” he laughed. “Mitch gave me a talking-to.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, he just told me that I might have walked in on him with Libby, but I’m not allowed to have sex in his house until I’m eighteen.”
My heart started drumming in double time. “Why?”
James laughed again. “Because Billy is an irresponsible, immature, insensitive—” James paused, “boy.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“It’s all right,” he soothed me. “He won’t be home when we’re together.”
This, foolishly, placated me immediately I told myself that tomorrow, again, I would be in his bed. A chain of days reaching into forever but starting with tomorrow and the next kiss.
A voice in the distance on James’s end of the line made him stop and call, “What?” Then to me he whispered, “I have to go.”
“Goodnight,” I said, and he was gone.
When Cathy came tapping at my bedroom door, a piece of thick yarn held back her hair, the edges wet from her shower. Without makeup, she looked younger. She was wearing a flannel bathrobe and slippers and brought me a book.
She put Why Christians Should Only Date Christians on my bedside table and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
I looked at the book, repelled. Cathy probably meant it as the treasured wisdom passed down from mother to daughter. Perhaps she had also shown Jenny the ritual of ironing a man’s shirt and defrosting a freezer. I wondered what Mitch had taught Billy about becoming a man. Had he taken his brother to work with him or taught him to shave? Or perhaps rites of passage had become extinct. I tried to remember my own lessons—did I struggle with the washboard or feel victorious after plucking a dead chicken bald? I could not recall.
Cathy paused in the doorway. “Do you understand why we don’t want you talking to strange boys at school?”
“You’re protecting me.”
“We want you to choose right and have a good Christian marriage.”
“Of course.”
“Your father and I have words sometimes.” She tightened the belt on her robe. “But it’s nothing to worry about.” Something she wasn’t saying aloud made her eyes tear up. “I have so much. There are women in this world whose husbands beat them, who have no homes, who can’t feed their children.” She nodded in agreement with herself. “I’m blessed.”
I felt I should say something. “That’s true.”
She sighed. “Say your prayers.” Then the door closed.
I couldn’t sleep. I read Jane Eyre until the clock said 1:37. That’s when I heard the garage door grinding. I turned off my lamp and put my book on the floor. I heard the floorboards in the hall creak and my door handle turn. I closed my eyes and lay very still. After a moment, I heard my door latch gently click shut, and I smelled it again. The very faint scent that I thought I’d imagined on his white shirt.
Thirteen
WHEN CATHY SUMMONED me to Prayer Corner, Dan was already keeping shepherd over the trio of chairs. We sat holding our Scriptures. I flipped through Jenny’s transcriptions, and phrases flew by—abomination to God—rejected the word of the Lord—punish all disobedience. I remembered then why July 6, the date in Jenny’s progress folder, was familiar. The diary in my hands began July 7, one day after Jenny brought home a less than perfect report card. Someone had ripped out whatever was written in her journal, and the next morning she had sat in the Prayer Corner and neatly printed the words Honor thy father and mother. I fingered the edges of Jenny’s lost memoirs.
“Is there anything you wish to tell us?” said Dan.
“About what?” I asked.
“Give the whole truth to God in prayer,” he warned me. “He’ll tell you what to do.”
During silent prayer, Dan loomed over me, placing a leaden hand on my head. I fought the urge to jerk away. More chilling still was the hot dampness of Cathy’s hand on my back.
“Lord, we call on you.” Dan’s voice was a death bell through my bones. “Come into Jennifer Ann’s heart and purify her. Give her divine endurance in the face of temptation. Turn her thoughts from sin. Purge her of all unclean ambitions, Lord. You blessed us with this child, but she is yours.”
An image of Abraham raising a sword over his child’s head made me shudder. I was sweating under Dan’s fingers. He entreated God to enter me, but I was sure that God had no interest whatever in comforting me, a stowaway in this girl’s temple. Perhaps I’d be chased out like a demon, the legion banished into the herd of swine. No hope of heaven.
“Heal her of all deceit and willfulness. Show her the path of the holy.”
When I spoke, my words overlapped with Dan’s “Amen.”
“I’m not your child.” I regretted it even before I saw Dan’s face.
“Jennifer—” Cathy was so shocked, she couldn’t form words. She jerked her hand off me.
Dan pulled back a step. Cathy looked from one of us to the other. The journal stuck to my hands, I was gripping it with such fervor.
“I’m afraid you won’t believe me,” I said.
Dan spoke as if countering a blasphemy. “Whether you are five years old or a hundred and five, we are your parents.”
“I mean tha
t I’m not who you believe me to be.”
“Don’t talk to your father like that.”
“Cathleen,” said Dan. “I’ll handle this.”
“I just can’t pretend to be Jenny anymore,” I said.
“We know you’re trying.” Cathy was almost in tears.
“Your daughter—” I couldn’t think how to explain Jenny’s departure.
“Stop this nonsense right now.” Dan placed his hand back on my head, heavier now. This wasn’t going well. I had promised myself to be kind to Cathy, and now I was frightening her.
“Apologize to your mother.” His grip tightened on my skull until my eyes ached and my scalp was sweating.
“I’m sorry.”
“Your will is God’s will,” said Dan. “Say it.”
“My will is God’s will,” I said. His grip loosened slightly. My head itched under his palm. “It’s probably just part of growing up.” I retreated as best I could. “I feel changed.”
Cathy seemed relieved, but Dan still held me, so I added, “Closer to God.”
“Explain,” said Dan.
“I almost feel like another person. As if I should have a new name. I feel so different. I was scared you wouldn’t believe me.”
Finally Dan gave my head a little jerk and released me. He took up the Bible and paced as he read aloud. “And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil.’”
I was so glad he wasn’t touching me anymore I almost laughed, but instead I swallowed back the skittish instinct.
“‘Full of envy,’” Dan read. “‘Murder, strife, deceit, malice, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God.’” He rattled off the rest of the list and was flushed by the time he shoved the Bible at Cathy.
She’d been nodding in sheeplike agreement, but her hand gripped the edge of her chair. The verse Dan gave her to dictate to me was from Ephesians. “Tut on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.’” I was halfway through the passage before I realized that I was writing in a curved hand nothing like Jenny’s printing.
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