The Divine Economy of Salvation (13 page)

The door handle turned, and then Mr. M. in his heavy fall coat stood obstructing the doorway in front of me. I blushed and dropped the pads I had been about to throw in my closet, spilling them onto the carpet. Mr. M. fell to his knees and started to pick them up for me as I fumbled with the cardboard package. Horrified, I slapped his hand.

“Don't—” I squealed and started to cry, shoving the pads haphazardly into the flimsy box and stowing them under the bed. The room trapped me, and Mr. M. approached without hesitation, his smile wide, his teeth as white as the pads, his gums the colour of my blood.

“No need to cry,” he spoke softly. “No need to cry, little Angel.” And he stroked my hair, while I, frozen, let him, his pungent cologne wrapping around me. I felt a tingle where the blood was, an ache, like the way I felt when we looked at pictures of men in magazines with their shirts off, but stronger. I wanted to push myself away from him, protect that feeling for pictures and not for real male bodies, but I couldn't. “It's a natural thing, you know. You don't think I do, but I do know about these things. I'm a married man. I've known girls in my day.”

His words swarmed me and I wanted to swat at them like flies, but the stroking soothed me.

“I want my mother,” I said, and buried my head in his chest, his warm skin close enough that if I quivered I'd be kissing him, his hair in my mouth. I was utterly flustered to have Rachel's father discover I was having my period, and afraid at what I was allowing myself to feel for him in the process, but I parted my lips slightly and tasted salt. I'm sure I felt him tremble.

Rachel found us in this way, me tight in her father's arms, and she kicked her shoe against the door, annoyed we were keeping her from leaving for our outing. Ashamed, I burrowed deeper into Mr. M.'s chest to avoid her gaze. I didn't know what she would think of me seeking comfort in her father's arms, whether she would tease me or force me to stay away from him. I envied Rachel for her father, who always wanted to be close to her.

“Dad,” she said forcefully. “Let's go.”

Mr. M. rose to attention. His entire body stiffened, abandoning with it the illusion of continuous movement that he normally possessed. Rachel traipsed back down the hallway and Esperanza, wearing her new red beaded necklace, followed. Mr. M. wiped his hands across his pants, mumbling under his breath words I couldn't quite make out, except for the end of a sentence: “she doesn't know.”

“She doesn't know,” he said then in a louder voice, “what it's like to be lonely.” He patted my shoulder and placed a couple of quarters into my palm, whispering, “You get yourself something to make you happy.”

We joined the other girls, a group of about eight Leftovers. Rachel was a Leftover too, technically, but no one treated her that way. She seemed, of anyone, the most loved daughter. I tried to take
my mind off the new pain I was feeling in my abdomen, my mind off the blood, off what it might lead to, off of Rachel's newly broken body. Esperanza had thought it was I who was changed and I was secretly pleased by the mistake. But she was wrong. And I wondered whether Mr. M., who had known girls in his day, sensed the change in Rachel, if that's why he rose to attention when she spoke. Because she was now a woman, and I was still only a girl.

When Rachel introduced an anxious Esperanza to Mr. M., he welcomed her in as large a voice as he could muster within the school walls, “Well then, since you are new, you must sit beside me in the theatre.” The sparkle from his gold cufflinks transferred directly to the irises in Esperanza's eyes.

THE POLICE COME BY
early in the morning to take Kim to the station. She had been forewarned a couple of days before, but still appears shocked as two officers pull up, their car's siren turned off, in the back lot of the convent. She wears fresh clothes, washed by Sister Josie and donated by Sister Bernadette, who is close to her in size, and her hair is brushed back into a short and stubby ponytail. She appears much younger than fifteen, despite her swelling middle. One would almost think she were afraid of her first day at school, the way she clings to my hand as we walk towards the lobby, her hands nervous, her voice high-pitched and slightly pained, trailing half a step behind.

“I'm going to come back, right?” she asks me, her eyes, generally oval, round with fear.

“Like I said, as long as you don't have a record and no one's filed a Missing Person Report, you'll be back before you know it.” I try to make my voice sound cheerful. I am, however, exhausted, deprived of sleep by nightmares about the past and the quest to discover who wants me to remember it. At evening Mass I almost
grabbed a woman from behind, her voice reminding me of Caroline. But she stopped to chat with another woman and I saw that she was far too old. She had a wider nose and higher-set eyebrows as well. Notwithstanding the mistake, the hint of familiarity around me has been consistent and palpable; I can taste it, the way you can taste the seasons changing in the air. A hair colour, or a scent, an inflection in a voice, a mannerism in the hands or in a person's stride—anything and everything is feeding my imagination to couple the present with the past. The woman behind the counter at the grocery, the woman who bent her head and opened the confessional at church, a woman's feet outside my window: all hammer the same question,
Who has come for you?
We have a lot of Spanish families who attend church, and I could have sworn there was a young woman whose hands were exactly like Esperanza's. I forgot to do the math. Esperanza would not be nineteen with calloused fingers any longer. She'd be a woman only slightly older than me, with kids and a husband most likely. But I eyed the Spanish families suspiciously. If Esperanza did send the candle holder, she'd have done it like this. Let me wait in silence, torturing myself. She'd have enough bitterness welled up in her, I'm sure, to strike out at the most inopportune moment. I'd nearly forgotten about her. But she knew everything that transpired at St. X. School for Girls. She knew what was in our hampers, what was in our garbage. I used to wonder how she kept so many secrets to herself. Then again, I had something on her too. I suppose it is all important now, if there's a debt to be paid. In order to carry or uncover a secret, one must first determine its worth.

“I don't have a record,” Kim states defensively.

I trust her on that account. She's a good kid. A little too trusting maybe to some boy who told her she was beautiful and he'd love her forever, or a little too curious or stupid to take the proper precautions she could have obtained at a medical clinic, from a drugstore pharmacy counter, or from the metal dispensers in public washrooms. She isn't rude or disrespectful, and blushes when anyone asks her a personal question. It's as if it's never occurred to her that the day might come when she would need to explain her situation. As if she herself has no idea, has been struck unwittingly with a bulging middle, a Virgin Mary without an angel to explain the grand purpose of her pregnancy.

“So,” I repeat, releasing my hand from hers as we approach an officer, a man in a bomber jacket and beige slacks leaning against the wall beside the convent door, the other officer in the front seat of the car. “Unless someone's looking for you, they're going to bring you back here.”

I've salvaged a jacket from our Lost and Found to keep her warm, as it has started snowing and the winds have picked up force over the last two days. She arrived here with nothing, this girl, like an orphan dropped off on our doorstep.
An orphan going to give birth to an orphan,
I think.
The blind leading the blind.
The rummage sale over for another season, I am now required to go through the items in the Lost and Found. My method involves dating the items. A one-year time limit, because there are those who only come to church on the festive occasions of Christmas or Easter. The usual things are left over: black umbrellas, odd mittens and gloves on church pews or buried underneath snowbanks that become visible in the spring,
scarves and skull caps, bus passes now expired, small pieces of jewellery such as earrings or bracelets thought to have been lost somewhere else, a binder or datebook, the events since transpired. Purses, of course, are always retrieved, and with complete relief and thanks. As are jackets in the spring or autumn, which tend to be left behind because the weather has warmed for the day. These things are expensive to replace. Yet people do return for things I wouldn't think twice about. Once a woman took a cab to the church to retrieve a lip balm, asking me to keep it aside with her name on it in case I wasn't here when she arrived. A man lost a button from his coat and came every week to search for it, because each button had been stitched on by his late wife. An older woman who could barely manage to walk down the hallway to the Lost and Found booth was nearly in tears one Sunday because she had lost her bus transfer. I've learned you just can't tell what people will want back. I am no closer now than I was when I started this duty fifteen years ago to discovering what people value most. Whenever I remove things from the box, I'm worried someone, some day, will come back and accuse me of depriving them of their ownership rights. Even though the jacket I gave Kim has been ownerless for only about a month, I rationalize that if anyone had needed it, they would already have come back to get it. If anyone asks now, I'll say it was never here.

I lead Kim through the cold air, which tastes of the brutal winter to come, over to the cruiser with its motor running. I try to keep my face hidden, wearing my wimple purposefully, keeping my chin down. But the men, as usual, seem to have their attention on the young girl, on Kim. I am just the deliverer.

“No one's looking for me,” Kim says, settling into the back of the cruiser, behind the screen. For a second, it seems almost possible that she is in one of the church confessionals and not in a police car. I'd never thought of it before, but it occurs to me now that both are used for similar purposes. I hope the policemen will be good to her, not ask too many questions, not force her to speak directly about her past.

I shut the passenger door and walk back to the convent entrance. The falling snow melts into my collar. If no one's looking for you, Kim, I think, you're luckier than you know.

ESPERANZA'S ROOM WAS LOCATED
on the ground floor of the dormitory beside the furnace room. She said she liked it, bragged her room was the warmest of all, although we knew that wasn't the case. Her room was even smaller than ours were, barely housing her bed and the end table she used as a dresser. She had no closet; her clothes were hung on the inside doorknob and her uniforms in the staff room, where she was allocated a locker. Her underwear and socks and other personal items were kept in a nylon suitcase that was never closed, because she required these things on a daily basis. Once, Rachel told me, Esperanza had asked for a room in the dormitory with the older girls, but the nuns had refused, told her she needed to keep her distance. No matter. Esperanza still managed to keep abreast of what happened in the school. And not from eavesdropping or by any special power the girls sometimes accused her of possessing, a dark mysterious ability bred in generations of women in her Spanish family. No, she learned a great deal from access to our rooms and the washrooms; she learned the rest from Rachel.

Rachel met Esperanza immediately. Mr. M. had arrived with
Rachel in tow the day she'd been admitted to the school, three years before I was enrolled there. Esperanza had just completed the minimum amount of required education before accepting the job, and Rachel needed an ally. Esperanza knew Rachel's father was rich and held sway with the nuns. It was a simple exchange on both parts. Rachel had always been a curious girl, and Esperanza's age and experience appealed to her. Esperanza made sure Rachel was happy. She waited on her especially, bringing her treats and ensuring she was well looked after by the nuns when her father wasn't around. She handled any of her requests through the delivery boy, and as to any indiscretions occurring in Rachel's room, any breaking of the school and boarding rules, Esperanza kept quiet. In exchange, Rachel gave her gifts and money, and ensured her job by speaking well of her to the nuns on occasion. Although Rachel did not encourage Esperanza to have any contact with her father when he came to take the girls out for cake or to the movies, Esperanza still benefited from Mr. M.'s generosity.

The day I caught Esperanza and Mr. M. together, we were suiting up for a skating expedition on the canal. The ice froze early that year, and city officials opened the canal to the public a month ahead of schedule. Many of the local merchants who set up booths on the ice were pleased. The canal remained frozen for four full months before spring arrived to melt it. A big band played on the night of its opening. We could hear the music from our dormitory rooms, leaning out our windows, breathing into our hands for warmth, trombones and saxophones belting into the night sky. We gathered for a Sisterhood meeting the Friday before, and instead of
our usual games we decided to dance in Rachel's room, pretending we were with the skaters on the canal. Caroline claimed her sister was dancing there for real as we listened. Earlier that day we had witnessed a troupe of women with picket signs marching down the street to the Parliament Buildings. They wanted the crowd heading to the opening of the canal to join their protest. A women's group, fighting for equal pay for equal work. They marched in front of our school, chanting to us girls as we watched them through the iron gates. The women, dressed warmly, held aloft cardboard signs that read “Women Are People Too” and “Feminists Unite” and “Working to Live and Living to Work.” A skinny woman who stepped out of line for a moment to scan us girls pushed her sign against the iron gate: “I Am NOT a Baby Factory.” The overlooking nuns did not return the chants or acknowledge the picketers, but they didn't actively disapprove of them either. The nuns worked for a living; they had no children themselves. They let us watch without reproach.