Almost Eden (11 page)

I didn’t feel much like praying tonight. I didn’t feel much like sleeping either. My mind was still too wide awake
yet, wide awake and thinking about shock treatments.

Were they trying to shock Mom out of being sad? How did you do something like that?

Maybe you could tell a shocking story, one that was really scary. Or wait until a person came around a corner and jump out at them, yelling. Or dump a pail of cold water on them when they opened a door.

I kept thinking over and over again of all the ways to shock a person.

That way I didn’t have to think about the one way that made me want to throw up.

T
he day started out top-of-the-summer hot. And then got hotter.

I’m talking road-melting-in-front-of-you hot. Can’t-walk-barefoot-on-the-pavement hot. Bike-tires-sink-into-the-asphalt hot. The kind of hot where you get out of the pool to suntan but in two minutes your skin is burning and you have to jump in the water again. The kind of sticky, wilty, dripping hot where you lie in bed at night with no covers, wearing nothing but underwear and still stick to the sheets.

Pray-for-a-thunderstorm hot.

Dad said I should take a few days off until it was more bearable again. But I painted for a couple of hours early in the morning anyways, because what else was there to do and because I liked painting.

First thing after lunch, Lena and I went looking for Tommy. We checked up and down the alley on our way to the pool. We checked between the stacks in the lumberyard at the end of the block where Tommy sometimes liked to hang out. We even walked along the railway tracks, checking to see if he was hiding out in the ditches maybe.

“I bet he found a girlfriend, or some old lady who likes cats,” I said. “He’ll be back. He takes off like this all the time, not?”

Lena chewed on her lower lip, a sure sign she was worried. I wiped the sweat off my face. Right now all I wanted was to go for a swim.

The pool was crowded already by the time we got there. Even the parking lot was full. Lena grabbed the one empty spot in the bike racks and ran off to find her friends. It took me a while to find enough room for my bike. I was wedging it into place when a shrill, angry voice close by nearly made me jump out of my skin.

“You just come along with me! Right this instant.”

There was Mrs. Friesen maybe a dozen steps up the slope, coming around the corner of the fence and headed my way. I ducked behind my bike, like I was fixing the chain or something.

“Don’t you try playing dumb with me, young man. I saw you take my son’s money.”

Curiosity got the best of me. I lifted my head just enough to peer over top of my bike seat. One look at Mrs.
Friesen was enough to make a person fall to their knees and pray for salvation on the spot. She was hauling a scrawny, half-naked Mexican kid by the wrist. The kid’s eyes were ready to pop right out of their sockets. Mattie and Jonah were hiding behind their mom.

A trickle of sweat tickled as it ran down the middle of my chest.

“Hand it over,” Mrs. Friesen demanded. She held out one hand, waiting, never letting go of the kid’s wrist with the other.

“I-I find da money, lady. Yust dere.” The kid pointed beside the sidewalk and stuttered something in Plautdietsch.

“You know very well my son dropped it,” she said. “Taking money that doesn’t belong to you is stealing. Stealing is a terrible sin. People who steal go to jail.”

Terrified, the kid dug in his pocket with his free hand. He fished out some change and held it out. Mrs. Friesen grabbed it. But she didn’t let him go. She stayed clamped down on his wrist and gave it to him still more, about how God had seen what he did and how he must ask for forgiveness or God would make sure that he was punished.

The boy mumbled something in Low German again. He was so petrified he probably forgot how to speak English. Probably he belonged to one of the Mexican Mennonite families that came up to work in the fields every summer.

The look he was giving the kids in the pool pretty much said it all. It was a blistering hot day and he wanted to go swimming. Only he didn’t have a quarter to get in. I bet he thought it was his lucky day when he saw that money lying in the grass. But instead of a nice dip in the pool, he’d got Mrs. Friesen threatening him with eternal damnation.

“I never steal nothing,” the boy pleaded, trying to pull away. “Please, lady.”

Mrs. Friesen shook him a little. “Didn’t steal it, indeed. Don’t let me catch you near my boys, again. Is that clear?”

The second Mrs. Friesen let go of his wrist, the kid tore off. I heard a truck start up, and then a dirty, battered pick-up pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the park road behind me. For some reason I ducked deeper into the row of bikes. By now my legs were all pins and needles. They needed to stand up already but I had to stay scrunched behind my bike while Mrs. Friesen fussed over her monsters yet, warning them to stay away from boys like that. Finally they headed to the pool. It seemed like forever but the whole thing probably only took a couple of minutes.

No big deal. Except…

One time I watched my cousin skinning some mink that he’d trapped. First thing he cut up the mink’s back legs to its tail, working the fur off. Then he hung the mink up by its back feet and just sort of sliced here and sliced
there and then peeled the pelt back whole, like taking off a sock inside out. The skin came away that easy, too.

I felt like I was that mink, watching Mrs. Friesen–who sat up front in church every Sunday and taught Sunday School and everything–watching her chew up and spit out that little kid who only wanted to go for a swim. Like I was the one turned inside out.

I was still feeling sick about it when Jillian and Sadie showed up at the pool together, pretending nothing had changed. Only they laid out their towels with Aaron and Pete on either side. So then I made myself into a robot like Mom, a robot that found a spot to sun tan beside Joy, and smiled brightly at Jillian and Sadie while they talked about what a great time they’d had at the lake. I could pretend nothing had changed, too.

Even if everything had changed.

My best friends were now best friends with each other and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I wanted Aaron to like me but he didn’t. I wished Mark didn’t like me but maybe he did.

In school last year my teacher, Miss Gerbrandt, caught me passing a note to Aaron one time. It wasn’t about anything, and it wasn’t like I was the only one who was passing notes, but I was the one who got caught. She sent me to stand in the hall, then came out and told me I was way too young to be thinking about such things as boys.

“I don’t want any more of this nonsense in class, understand?” she said.

How can a person be too young to think about boys? If you’re thinking about them, then you’re thinking about them. A person doesn’t go looking for thoughts like that. The thoughts are just there, in your head. You think what you think.

If I could stop thoughts like that I would because they send messages to other parts of a person’s body and make a person feel weird. Which is okay I guess, if the person you like likes you back. But for sure it isn’t so nice if he doesn’t.

Jillian and Sadie hadn’t been grounded. Maybe they hadn’t told their parents even. I hadn’t told Dad yet. Now that I’d waited this long, I figured I might as well not bother. Maybe he wouldn’t find out. Except not saying anything was sort of like lying and lying was definitely a sin. Especially when you were lying to your parents. That was like breaking two commandments at once.

My list of sins was getting pretty long. Lying, stealing, being jealous, fighting, swearing, thinking impure thoughts. No wonder God wasn’t answering my prayers.

And now there was this. What I’d seen in the park didn’t seem right. I couldn’t make it fit with what we learned in Sunday School. If a Christian wasn’t always a good person, did that mean good people weren’t always Christians?

Reverend Funk says God is love. But then the reverend and even the Bible say that to be saved from eternal hell a person has to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior.

Even in Hopefield I knew that not everyone believed
in God the same way Mennonites did. I knew about Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Catholics. Were all the people who believed differently going to hell? Did everyone have a different God, or were they all the same God with different names? What made Mennonites right and everyone else wrong?

What about people who didn’t believe in God at all?

Would God really damn people to hell–even if they were good people like say, Ghandi–just because they maybe grew up believing something else?

I was suddenly shivery inside and out even if the temperature was over ninety degrees already. A terrible thought crept into the back of my mind. It was so terrible I pushed it back out before I could finish thinking it even.

A thunderstorm grumbled all around us most of the afternoon, but it never got close enough for the lifeguards to make us get out of the pool. I wished it would rain, a real downpour, and scrub the whole world clean like it did for Noah.

Conditions favored it, but instead the storm blew around us.