The Divine Economy of Salvation (31 page)

I was on my way down the stairwell to the church when I ran into Sister Marguerite, climbing up.

“Where are you going, Angela? It's way past bedtime,” she said.

It was nearly midnight and the hallways were mainly silent, except for the water periodically running in the washroom, its sound reminding me of Bella's attempts to wash herself clean.

“I wanted to pray,” I replied tentatively. “In the church.”

Sister Marguerite regarded me suspiciously for a moment, and I was starting to panic from my guilt, rubbing my hands together to keep from sweating. I was alone here. I would have no father or mother or sister present at the funeral. No one to comfort me over what had happened. My last refuge seemed to be the church, the only place that would welcome me at this hour. I wanted to pray for Bella's soul, ask the Lord to take her up in His hands and reward her for the times she had sung for Him. Ask Him to overlook her small trespasses and the irrevocable act against the body He gave her that
she had performed in a moment of weakness. She simply wanted to belong. Certainly He could understand.

I was disturbed that I hadn't yet shed tears over Bella's death. I wanted my mother, but knowing she couldn't be with me, I longed to fling myself into Sister Marguerite's arms, lay my head in her ample chest, whether she comforted me or not. She wasn't pretty, the left side of her face marked by a patch of yellowish discoloration, her manner withdrawn, but I wanted her to touch me then, on the shoulder or on my hair, to hold me against her. Sister Marguerite kept her lips pursed, her body straight and reserved. Her arms were occupied, holding a heavy cardboard box in front of her. Perhaps my clothes are inappropriate, I thought, looking down at the thick white cotton nightgown I hadn't bothered to cover up when I left my bedroom.

“I could change,” I offered.

Sister Marguerite shook her head and relaxed her cheeks. “No. That's all right, Angela. You can go.”

As I brushed past her, Sister Marguerite dropped her cardboard box, shocking us both with the thud against the concrete echoing in the hollow stairwell. She managed to save the box from tumbling down the stairs with her foot but some of its contents escaped. She let out a moan. We both bent down to pick up the mess, a pile of papers and notebooks we swept up with our hands. I recognized the diligent and letter-perfect handwriting, the name at the bottom corner of each of the papers. My hands removed themselves as if of their own will.

“I thought Bella's parents might like to have these,” said Sister
Marguerite, her eyes blinking rapidly. “She was such a good student. Impeccable, really. It's unbelievable to think she . . .”

Hurriedly she grabbed the rest of the papers and stuffed them into the box. Sheets protruded from its corners. She pressed them down, creasing the leaves.

The doctor was sympathetic. The medical report stated Bella died of internal hemorrhaging. Her parents were telephoned by Mother Superior, who assured them the nuns did not realize Bella had been feeling any pain, if indeed she had been before she died. Bella was never the type to complain, they explained. These things happen and answers are difficult to find. Accidents of nature. The body revolts against itself. In young girls in particular, there can be complications as the body grows into womanhood. She had not been to a doctor in over a year. The body can be like a bomb, ticking, ticking. Bella's parents were led to believe she was simply a tragic example of God's mysterious ways. An angel, Sister Aline said, her song so sweet God could not bear to be without her any longer. Bella's mother needed her husband to translate the English into Portuguese throughout the ordeal. Where Bella's father found the words, I couldn't tell you. “Bella is certainly at peace wherever she is,” Sister Aline reassured them. “Have faith.” Bella's mother cried out in Portuguese, wringing her hands and collapsing against her husband. No one translated what she said.

The girls were told the same story as Bella's parents: Bella died of internal hemorrhaging. She died in her sleep without pain. But
the nuns suspected we knew how she was found. The nuns believed, as Esperanza did, that Bella had tried to perform an abortion on herself. The verdict was logical if scandalous. The wounds fit the description, if not her character. But facts were facts. Who could have guessed otherwise? There was no evidence to the contrary. The silver candle holder had disappeared.

On the day Bella was found, Rachel avoided me in the cafeteria. We sat at a table with a couple of other girls and drank the hot apple cider Sister Aline had asked the kitchen staff to brew for us. They were confused, pouring out the drinks into paper cups, unable to account for the crying and the stunned, shocked expressions and subdued movements of their normally boisterous consumers. They worked around us like nurses, scurrying from one to the next, asking us if we needed anything else, not waiting for an answer before they moved on to the next table.

Rachel, who took pride in being one of the oldest girls in the school, now appeared as helpless and childish as the rest as she sucked on her straw, drinking the warm cider into her belly. She sat next to Sister Marguerite like a good student awaiting instructions. Sister Aline put a protective hand on my shoulder, a little sorry perhaps that she had sent me to find Bella. I could not drink, but pretended to, blowing air into my straw when someone glanced over at me. The noise was unbearable. Sipping and crying and talking and shuffling. But the silence was equally unbearable when it came. Pauses of emptiness reminding us there was one less girl in the school now. I scanned the girls' faces, trying to determine who was
crying because there'd been a death and who was crying because they'd been fond of Bella. I didn't know who Bella's friends were. We might have been her only ones.

The Chinese women in the kitchen had begun to boil hot water and stir soup, preparing for an early dinner. They chopped vegetables, cut up meat, and cleaned the free tables, never stopping to ask what had happened. I wondered, not for the first time, whether they cared about us or whether they regarded us as objects to manoeuvre around, the manner in which we usually treated them.

Even after Mother Superior came to take us to our common rooms and to speak with each of the grades separately, after the doctor had left and the official report had been recorded and Bella's parents had been notified, Rachel still did not speak with me. She slunk to her room and turned off her light as we were all told to do. She finally succumbed to the nuns' authority. I wanted to join her, crawl into her bed underneath whichever afghan was currently being used, but she did not want anyone with her. It was Caroline who stopped me and said, “I don't believe it. I've never known anyone who's died before, have you?”

I shook my head. Death was what happened in the newspapers and to relatives I'd never met. Death happened on paper, not in front of me. Death happened in the movies. Death happened overseas and in books. It happened in the Bible, but the good were resurrected or rewarded, and because we were told they went to Heaven, we didn't question their deaths. I couldn't imagine Death's face or Death's hands around Bella's body. What did He want with her?

“I'm scared,” I said.

Caroline turned away from me to obey the nuns and retire to her room for the night, but I still caught what she said under her breath, possibly unaware she was speaking out loud. She said,
I don't want to die.
But that night, I wanted to. If I couldn't be beside Rachel, I wanted to go with Bella. Inexplicably, I felt closer to her than to anyone else.

As we collected the last of the papers off the grey concrete, I bumped my jaw against Sister Marguerite's cheek. Her yellow bruise was so close to my lips I could have kissed it. Some of the girls joked she had received it in a fist fight with Mother Superior one night, or she had painted it on her face on purpose to make us feel sorry for her and pay attention in class. The more plausible explanation was she had a disease, which allowed those of us who didn't like her to keep our distance from fear of contagion. My resolve to go pray was still firm, but I needed to know the truth about how she'd acquired the stain on her face.
The stains of sin,
I could hear her say, as she did about adulterous women in the Bible stories we read. I was fairly sure she was born with it and it must have been small when she was a newborn, gradually stretching out to cover her entire cheek, until it resembled in size and colour an autumn leaf.

“Sister, what happened?” I asked.

She had collected all the papers now, and she looked up, frazzled. “God only knows.”

“I mean . . . your cheek. The bruise,” I said, pointing to my own face.

Perhaps the last couple of days had drained her of any protectiveness. She barely hesitated to answer me, taking a short breath and speaking with the same clipped precision as she did in class. “When I was a small girl, I loved watching my father putting paper into the fireplace. My father had these huge hands and he would chop the wood outside, splitting it with his axe in short, blunt stokes. He kept old newspapers in a pail by the fire, and he would use the poker to place them in the spaces between the wood, close to the coals. They would flare up and I thought they looked so beautiful. Like stars.”

She was struggling now with her words, holding tightly onto the sheets of paper Bella had written on. “You see, I had been warned not to go near the fire, but I wanted to place the paper in myself. I wanted to prove to him that I could. But I couldn't control it the way my father could. The paper flew out and struck me in the face. It burned off half my scalp when it landed on my hair.” She touched the left side of her head, the material of her wimple covering the area the fire must have singed. “It was an accident, but I've been left with this scar as a reminder of my carelessness. And my pride.”

She straightened up abruptly then, tapping her toe, the manner in which she ended all her classes. “You come let me know you've returned,” she said, waving her hand at me to get going. “It's late, Angela. You need sleep.” And I agreed, following the stairwell down, the memory of her hair burning in my mind, praying prematurely I'd be spared the scars of my youth.

I entered the church through the double oak doors adjacent to the school. A stained-glass picture of Jesus on the cross, his perpetual
suffering on display, his brown crown of thorns the only opaque section of the figure, stared me in the face, and I turned immediately to cross myself with the holy water at the entrance.
The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit,
I whispered.
Forgive us our trespasses. As we Forgive those who trespass against us.
The emptiness of the church calmed me, its smell of pine cleaner and the thirty-foot-high ceiling with the triangular wooden arches. The felt banners we had made in Religion class, with cut-outs of white doves and small pillars of fire and letters spelling out words such as Peace and Glory, hung from the altar and from the pulpit. It was the lack of a voice I had been stalking, a silence, and it took a full minute for me to realize there was a steady metallic noise like the clinking of cutlery at the front of the church.

I tried to decipher the source of the sound. Some lights were left on, as Father McC. had promised, illuminating the altar with its white banner draped over the front, devoid of service ornaments. There were also lights at the entrances and exits, but it was difficult to see any image clearly more than a couple of feet away. An odd glow radiated at the left side of the church, near the front row of pews where the nuns usually sat at Mass with the elderly who found it difficult to stand in line for the Eucharist and were therefore first to receive Communion. Out of the glow emerged a figure with familiar blonde curls.

Rachel was in a nightgown too, of yellow cotton, and from her emanated a glow, a bright haze. She stood at one of the candle altars, and at her feet lay a green paper shopping bag, the kind we would buy for a dime at the department store in the Market when we went
to browse for clothes and purchase candies and treats at the confection stands. One by one she lifted a coin with her right hand from the palm of her left, and slipped it in the locked copper deposit box. Clink. Clink. Clink. Each coin inserted through the small slot. Then she removed a long wooden stick from the jar to the left of the altar and lit a candle.

I watched her from the back of the church, kneeling in the last pew, my head peeking out from behind the backs of the benches for probably an hour. She moved in an orderly fashion and, as far as I could hear, she herself uttered no sound. Clink. Clink. Clink. Coins from the paper rolls in her hands into the deposit box. Then the wooden stick. The votive candle. She made her way, lighting the back row, wick by wick, then attacking the row in front of it, and so on until she conquered the entire altar. The section aglow, she would pick up her paper bag and shuffle down to the next stand, lay the bag at her feet, and begin again. As the box filled up, the sound of clinking was muffled. She had finished the altar on the far left side of the church pews before I entered. Her bag, however, was still full, her body revealing strain as she hoisted it.

She didn't pause between her movements, which was unusual. We were taught you paid to light a candle for someone and then stood still or kneeled to say a prayer in his or her favour. When my father remembered to send me money for the collection plate, I would keep a quarter aside and light one of the votive candles at the end of Sunday Mass for my mother. I generally said the Hail Mary after lighting it. But Rachel's lips were shut and she stared at the deposit box, not at the candles.

I could not bring myself to tell her I was there. I thought about the story Sister Marguerite had told us: Jesus in the temple denouncing the money lenders. Rachel's actions were not being obstructed. She was not hit with a thunderbolt or drowned in a flood. She was free to do as she pleased, alone by all appearances and her rolls of money plentiful. Her father's money, it seemed, was always welcome at the church. As she progressed, the church filling steadily with light, the stained-glass pictures glorious as the brightness grew, Rachel's actions were, against my will, pleasing me. The beauty of the serene church, a young woman in her nightgown, the dozens upon dozens of candles gave me a flicker of hope I hadn't felt since holding my mother at Christmas. The two-dimensional figures came alive in the light. Pictures of suffering and dying, yes, but the ecstasy of uplifted arms in Resurrection shone. The church breathed.