Jesus Saves (16 page)

Wearing the traveling stole around his neck, her father raised the wafer, stamped with a dove, and Sandy's mother's head flopped forward in complete capitulation. He moved the wafer to her lips and her tongue darted out and took the wafer. Ginger's father tipped the tiny communion goblet to Sandy's mother's mouth, her throat shifting as she swallowed the wine. Her father's lips moved again, as he raised his hand up to his forehead, down past his chin, from shoulders, right to left, in the sad sign of the cross.

Sixteen: SANDY

“Stand still, if you want to look gorgeous,” the butterfly said, as he applied mascara to the unicorn's long lashes, glittery purple eye shadow to his lids and pink nail polish to his marbled hoofs. The troll's mouth moved but no sound came out. He sat on the cellar steps and ate from a paper plate of hash browns drenched in ketchup.

“There's some for you,” he said with his mouth full. “Don't you want it?” She smelled the onions, saw the lumps of potatoes he dumped onto the paper. She reached her hand out and brought the warm mush to her mouth. The food went down her sore throat like gravel. Pain laid on the newspapers like cold black stones. She was
there only to contain and connect these sensations. When she looked over at the stairs, the troll was gone and the ridges of the brown cardboard gave off a little light. Had he been there at all? Or was that yesterday? She heard lead snakes racing over the wooden floor above her head and realized the troll was moving the furniture, pushing all the chairs and tables to the front of the house. The floorboards strained with the added weight and she imagined the house staggering forward, then sinking deeper into the mud.

When the unicorn came on stage he wore white bell-bottoms, his silk shirt unbuttoned to the navel, a gold chain dangling around his neck; the strobe lights went crazy as he sang a wild song about loneliness and love. In the closet, Sandy decided to let the boy put his hand up under her shirt. Dresses dangled above their heads as the boy slid his fingers over the skin of her stomach. Because he smelled like a zillion school lunches, she was afraid to touch him, instead bracing herself, one hand around the toe of a high heel, the other gripping the sole of a tennis shoe. The closet door swung open and the light let her see the expanse of newspapers spread over the basement floor and the pruning shears hung on a nail against the far wall.

“Keep it down,” the troll said, then shut the door again. She pulled her knees closer to her chest and coughed so hard she choked up some bitter-smelling gunk. The troll opened the door again and rushed down the stairs, stood in the wedge of light, and glared at her. His eyes magnified by his glasses, his white beard made him look like the God of hash browns and cold pancakes.

The boy said he liked the drawing on her notebook of the unicorn and the butterfly with big doe eyes. She heard the TV going and opened her eyes to see the troll in a different shirt bending over
in the far recesses of the basement. But by the time she opened her mouth, he disappeared. She heard him upstairs moving the furniture again; stone snakes raced across the ceiling. And something was in her mouth, mealy and sweet. It took a minute to recognize the flavor, narrow it down to a fruit, then land on the letters, arrange them,
APPLE
. The seeds and the stem were like bark against her teeth. But she swallowed these bits and let pee drizzle against her thigh, run down the crack of her rear. And then the poke of a bone against her cheek and she winced. The troll offered her a pork-chop bone with a bit of meat on the end. She grabbed it quick and ran across the floor, squatted in the corner and gnawed the fat. He sat on the stairs laughing, calling her his little monkey. Cute little monkey girl.

As the van paused at a red light, she glanced through the black curtains. Angels were strapped to every light post. Angels made of white shredded plastic, gold halos hovered above their flesh-tone heads. Their gowns were covered with car exhaust. Sandy recognized them from the highway in front of the mall. The van turned. Its tires wobbled like wagon wheels along an unpaved road. She was thrown up against something warm, something soft. The cat, she thought, and flipped her head to see the last bit of streetlight shine on a mess of shiny brown hair. It was Sandy Patrick dressed in footed pajamas with teddy bears on them. She was the little monkey, skinny as a pencil and covered with black and blues, and here was Sandy, ruddy-cheeked and almost chubby, her eyelids showing the spastic flicks that signaled REM sleep.

The van stopped and the troll turned off the engine. All she could hear was his breath coming from deep down in his murky lungs, and then he hacked some mucus out the window. Cars rushed down the highway and she heard the soft sound of snow gathering on the windshield.

The girl gave off a dry and comforting warmth like an electric blanket turned to the lowest setting. Wind hissed through the motorboat tarps, got caught in the ice-covered boards of the dock. Deep inside the green ice, a half-dead fish moved like a muscle spasm in the slushy body of water and the unicorn slipped as he landed on the man-made lake.

“Who will be with me?” she asked, but he pretended not to hear her, saying he'd just come by to give a quick hello, that he must hurry off as he was keynote speaker at the self-empowerment conference and already he'd missed the free baked chicken.

When he was as tiny as a bit of paper blown up into the sky, she watched the moon rise over the water. The skeleton baby waited inside. That bone baby would stay inside the moon forever. Only the dandelions kept changing from suns to moons, then back again.

Her nightgown broke up like tissue paper in water as he carried her back through the woods toward the cabin where the exhausted girls lay sprawled on their bunks. On the ground, books nobody wanted were encased in ice and she saw her blue feet, the nails like bits of hard candy. She felt a slight repulsion for them, like a plate of half-eaten food.

The cats, their fur the palest pink, each wore a necklace made of periwinkles and smoked cigarettes held in long rhinestone-studded holders. They sang in high trembling voices a sort of nonsense French and her little brother drew a unicorn with blue eye shadow and long silver lashes and he handed the picture to her and she thanked him and said she'd tape it up over her bed. It was easy really, these ideas, her mind, smoke-encased in ice. He threw the afghan onto the forest floor, spread the edges out with his foot, and laid her down near a pile of broken bricks.

“Shut up!” Sandy said, and the sound of her own voice, high-pitched and incoherent, terrified her.

“You must control your cough,” the troll said, his hair a mass of ice-covered strands. But she hadn't realized she was coughing. He squatted down and put his hand to her throat, fingers feeling for the glands just at her jawline, under her ear. “Swollen up like lima beans,” he smiled. “Poor little monkey.” But then the smile flew off his face and his features went blank as a hollow-eyed statue and she felt all the air leaving her life like an inner tube with a pinprick leak. The ice broke under her weight and she sank down into the lake's cold water. Her hand clawed out, frenzied and separate, until she grasped the lava rock and sat up in her bed, poured white sugar in her palm so the deer would tongue her lifeline, her blue-veined wrist. It felt nice, his urgent animal tongue. But still she couldn't help thinking,
Is this all there is to it?

The bear shook his head, took his hat off, looked down at her lying on the afghan spread over blue moss surrounded by broken plates. “My dear little girl,” he said sadly, “what else did you expect?”

Seventeen: GINGER

A hand-painted cross, given to him by a Latin American missionary, hung above the spy hole of the door to her father's room at the welfare hotel. She heard his old black shoes moving around the room, murmuring on the thin carpet. Oystery pigeon poops covered the window ledge to her left. Across the street, on the steps of the old stone church, a bearded man slept below the arch of headless angels. So much happened so fast that Ginger felt disoriented.

The congregation voted for expansion and to add another pastor. Mulhoffer, her father said, delivered this information as if the decision was as important to the church's history as the signing
of the Declaration of Independence was to America's. He'd actually made the last grandiose comparison and her father giggled nervously in a way that sounded, even to his own ears, a little bit satanic. A severance was arranged and he volunteered to vacate the parsonage immediately as long as his daughter could stay in the basement until the end of the month.

A door opened down the hall and a man, the one she'd seen weeks earlier in the hotel window, poked his head out. If people drank steadily and long enough they mutated into another species: frogish bleary eyes, noses like raw hamburger, a swimmy countenance brimming with longing and dread. He examined her jeans, her oversized jacket, her stringy hairdo and, deciding she was not altogether untrustworthy, smiled shyly.

“We already know all about Jesus,” he said in a friendly, cheerful voice, cynicism edging only the last word. “You tell him that.”

“Okay,” Ginger said as the man turned back to his room and raised the volume on his TV set.

Her father opened the door wearing a white T-shirt pulled out over a pair of black preacher pants, his arms thin and white as a child's.

“Are the old guys harassing you?” he asked in a forced tone meant to dispel their mutual embarrassment.

Ginger shook her head. “The man with the brush cut wants me to tell you he knows all about Jesus.”

Her father laughed, “He sure does. That guy's son died in Vietnam and his wife gave the family savings to a bounty hunter who said he'd bring the boy back alive.” Ginger remembered him telling the story to her mother over dinner one night. Her father knew something secret about almost everyone in town. To hear these narratives
was mesmerizing, but she worried that their accumulation had pushed her father over the edge.

He shook his head. “I gave the poor guy ten dollars, which your mother ridiculed me about for months.”

Her mother loved to tell stories of how her father had been tricked; the guy who said he had sleeping sickness, the man selling electric flashlights, the woman who came to the church office saying she needed money because her baby was sick.

He moved a pile of books so she could sit on the bed. Ginger forgot that the furniture in the house all belonged to the church and she was shocked by how little he had, a few boxes of theology books—one marked sermons contained thousands of legal pad pages. The folded blanket from the church office sat neatly at the end of the bed. On the card table by the window he set up an altar. Both his paintings, the ark in the gloomy canal and the dark forest topped by celebratory lilies, leaned up against the glass. Before them he arranged his round-faced bust of Martin Luther, the bronze praying hands, his Oxford Bible, and a set of silver candleholders he'd given her mother one year for Christmas. Leaning against the tarnished metal was a curling snapshot of Sandy Patrick in her brownie uniform, a big goofy smile spread over her face.

Ginger knew he and Ruth Patrick had become good friends. He used her minivan to move and last week Ginger saw them eating together at a fast-food place along the highway. She knew the tinfoil-covered paper plates of star-shaped sugar cookies and lemon squares came from Mrs. Patrick's kitchen. Even now, an open Tupperware container of brownies sat on top of the muted TV.

“What's going on at the house?” her father asked as if the
energy of his delivery could distract her from the half-eaten food and the room's general dinginess.

“They steamed off the wallpaper in the dining room yesterday and today they're tearing up all the carpet.”

Her father's pupils dilated and he got that spacey, nostalgic look. The ranch house had always been an embarrassment to him, the fake-wood paneling and hokey intercom system. Her mother had wanted to fix it up, but there was never any money to do it right, have drapes made, buy a proper couch. So the living room stood empty, just a ficus plant in one corner beside her father's pile of old
New York Times.

“What about my room? Your mother had that shade of blue mixed especially.”

“The minister's wife is going to paint the whole house beige. She wants to give the place a country look.”

Her father looked confused.

“Dollies, quilts, silk flower arrangements in antique flour mills.” Ginger remembered the petite woman with the teddy bear on her cotton sweater, her features set in a stagy display of empathy as she asked questions about the water stain under the kitchen sink.

“Oh dear,” her father grimaced. “God does work in mysterious ways.”

Ginger laughed sharp and flat as a gunshot. She was so relieved he could still joke that her shoulders slipped down and she let a long breath up from her lungs.

“Best to get out of there as soon as you can,” he continued. She hadn't told her father yet, but she'd been thinking of moving in with Ted. Since he disappeared, she thought of him like a delicate and slightly demented prince. She missed their late-night talks about
time travel and getting his navel pierced. Distance gave him a narcotic and slightly saintly appeal.

“So have you decided what
you're
going to do?” Ginger asked. The night of the news, his emphatic, wild-eyed ideas frightened her. He was going to Haiti to work with the poor; he was going to minister to the homeless and live among them on the streets.

His neck flushed a prickly nervous pink, and his face grew even paler. “Well, you know the economy is not what it used to be,” he glanced at the picture of a beach put into a dime-store frame and hung over the sagging twin bed, “and I'm not a young man either.”

Ginger nodded as he brought the Oxford Bible onto his lap and pulled out a glossy pamphlet. “I'm thinking of something along these lines, where my experience would come in handy.” He passed her the rectangle of slick-colored paper.

PEACE OF MIND
, the pamphlet spelled out in soft blue pastel letters, the typeface cursive and feminine. Inside was a photograph of a synthetic stone gate with two azalea bushes on either side of a newly paved asphalt drive. Above hung an iron sign with gold letters: Forest Rest Cemetery. Opposite the photo was a checklist, reasons why a cemetery plot was a good investment.

“I don't get it. You're going to work at the cemetery?”

Her father leaned back on the folding chair, one she knew he'd taken from the church basement. “No. No. I'll be selling plots door to door.”

He was tired. He was not himself. “You're kidding, right?” Ginger asked.

“Not at all.” A smile bit into his cheeks, its rigid architecture all that held him up. Instead of moving into one of the condos on the highway, he moved to this monkish room in a sleazy hotel and
decided to do the job that most made his skin crawl. Grief sent her father into this alternate reality.

Ginger handed the pamphlet back. “You have gone completely nuts,” she said, spacing out each word for effect.

“Maybe so.” He looked down at the photo as if considering the possibility. Yellow stains were burned under the arms of his T-shirt and his eyes looked wet and confused, their expression not unlike those of the hotel's other shell-shocked residents.

“You know,” he said, “it's true what your mother used to say. I have no idea how the world works.”

Even from the grave her mother's endless accusations, long rooted in her father's head, grew up like goat grass through cracks in cement. Her father always countered her mother by saying she was chained like a slave to the world of things. But Ginger knew all she wanted was to be respectable, have a clean couch in her living room and a few nice dresses hanging in her closet.

“If you could have heard Mulhoffer,” her father's own voice trembled.

“Who cares.?” Ginger asked. “The man is a moron.”

Admiration filtered across his face but then the light drained out of his eyes. He'd decided there was no use trying to explain. “Of course you're right,” he said unconvincingly, his head swiveling like an adolescent's over her shoulder to the muted TV.

He bolted up and raised the volume. “Did you hear?” he asked, his eyes locked to the screen. “Another girl is missing.”

Ginger swung around on the bed, watched the video footage of police in black rain slickers being led by German shepherds on leashes through the woods.

“Who is it?”

“Shush,” her father nodded at the newscaster, a young man who jumbled his vowels and looked a little too excited as he delivered the facts. Police were searching the woods between Willow Brook subdivision and Creek Mist Condo Complex, where neighbors said kids sometimes played. The screen flashed to the house, a mint-green split-level. Press gathered under black umbrellas on the front lawn. The mother provided home-video footage; flickering and fuzzy sun dappled a picnic table covered with a red gingham cloth. And then the girl, a towheaded child with slate blue eyes in a strappy sundress, turned toward the camera. “Oh my God,” Ginger said, “I know that girl.”

Press vans lined the street in front of the girl's house, their white satellite dishes collecting cold drizzle. Inside one of the campers, a pinched-faced woman sat typing intently into her laptop computer. And inside a bland rental car, an older man talked on his cellular phone, glancing occasionally at his legal pad notes. The rain kept most of the media inside their vehicles, though she overheard two men in parkas standing outside a minivan talking about Sandy Patrick.

Smoke leaked from the carport next door to the girl's house, where a teenaged boy grilled hot dogs and filled his entrepreneurial cooler with Diet Cokes, and on the front lawn neighbors stood in little groups under umbrellas. Ginger saw two girls holding a candle and looking solemnly up at the house. A young female newscaster stood under a striped CBS umbrella and complained to the cameraman that Oprah had already offered the mother big money for an
exclusive and she heard Maury Povich had checked into the Hilton out by the airport.

A truck from the local TV station was parked in the driveway. Thick black cords ran out the back end, over the cement walk and through the front door. Ginger leaned inside, saw two men sitting below six screens, simultaneously showing a woman with the same fine features as her daughter say, “. . . please, whoever you are, let my little girl go. She's all I have in this world and I—.” Her mouth trembled, refused to make words, formed into the primordial O, and she stuck a Kleenex to her lips and pressed her head into the neck of the bald dentist. His little pony tail shifted, the one the girl always referred to as a rat's tongue.

The man inside the truck swiveled his chair around to face the other man sitting in front of the soundboard. “Bet you ten to one,” he said, “that little girl is already dead.”

“T-R-O-U-B-L-E!” the hippie spelled out, leaning out the screen door of his white house. The smell of rich dirt and sweet pot blossoms wafted around him. “That's what we called the spooky little girls down on the commune. There was one I remember who wore nothing but men's shirts, always had field flowers hanging out of her hair, and told everybody she was Jesus’ little sister.” The hippie shook his head. “Man, it's like I'm trying to tell you, everything is out of whack.”

“I need to keep looking,” Ginger said. She didn't have time to hear one of the hippie's apocalyptic manifestos. “Maybe she's waiting back at my house.”

The hippie looked skeptical. “Just don't call the police,” he said. “She'll turn up next week at the bus station in Palo Alto and the next thing you know we'll see her on
Entertainment Tonight
hanging on the arm of some movie star.”

“You think?” Ginger said hopefully.

“Sure,” the hippie said, “that's what always happened to all those girls, either that,” his loopy smile tensed, “or something else.”

No, he hadn't seen the girl, though she'd taken to calling him late in the night, singing her favorite songs to him over the telephone and asking if she could come over to score, Steve said as they stood in the living room, just inside the door. He wore a towel around his waist, seemed bored, kept his eyes half closed, his mouth slack.

“She's a freaky chick,” he said. “For all I know she could have walked into the woods and killed herself.”

“Did she say she was going to do that?”

“She said a lot of crazy stuff. How do I know?” he said, glancing down the hall, where Ginger suspected a woman waited in his bed, one of the older ladies who bought him tanks of gasoline and took him out for steak.

Her room was empty. Her sleeping bag wadded up on the bottom sheet, a fine layer of plaster dust covering everything from where the workmen were putting up drywall in the corner. Ginger flopped down on her bed. She held on to this picture, to the exclusion
of any thought or sensation, the girl sprawled on her bed sleeping deeply like a child, sweat dampening the nape of her neck. But now this last hope dissolved, leaving her sick with worry. Clenching her eyes shut so hard the usual silver blackness turned to orange, she heard blood thumping in her ears.
Please God bring her back
and she saw the girl walking around the mall with ten dollars in her pocket for an orange julius and a pair of earrings, the girl scratching a bug bite on the back of her calf and laughing in that self-conscious way she thought of as glamorous, talking about super-models, her favorite Cindy, getting her hair soft as silk pajamas, and the aggressive way she yanked perfume samples out of magazines.
If you bring her back,
she prayed to God,
I'll take care of her myself.
She imagined him like a black hole with a swirly ghost face and a booming, computerized voice. Better to pray to Jesus and his bullet-riddled body, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.