The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (50 page)

BOOK: The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel
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Jory held the slippers tightly to her T-shirt-covered chest and moved over to the bed and pulled back the bedspread and crawled beneath. The sheets smelled of nothing but laundry detergent, as did the pillow. She turned the pillow over and breathed in deeply. It, too, smelled only of Tide. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or heartbroken, or if it was even possible to be both. It wasn’t dark outside—there was still some softly warm light slanting through the window blinds, but Jory put her hands inside each of the slippers as if they were mittens and held them up next to her face and lay there listening to the sounds of the house: the soft ticking of the clock on the dresser and the even quieter sound of the few cars shushing by on the street outside. There was no carnival music to be heard, not a single bewitching, tinkling note. Jory guessed that she would probably never hear that peculiarly magical tune again. She could feel the babylike softness of one of the terry cloth slippers against her cheek as she drifted toward sleep, and for a second she even thought she could smell a hint of something very Grace-like in the room, something ineffable but close, mysterious, and utterly singular. The scent of her older sister, who would live on only inside the people who had loved and perhaps harmed her the very most.

The next morning Jory took a scalding hot shower that felt wonderful as it beat on the back of her neck. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she had done this, showered and used lotion all over her skin. She examined herself in the steamy mirror. Her breasts were actually
slightly bigger now, although this realization didn’t quite thrill her in the way that she had expected it to. Nothing was the way she had expected it to be.

Jory pulled her pants back on and then carefully eased Grace’s faded green T-shirt on. She brushed her wet hair until the tangles were completely gone.

Her father was at the dining room table. The
Arco Arcade
was spread out in front of him, but he didn’t seem to be reading any of it. Jory sat down across from him and for an extended moment she examined him.

His hair was slightly messy and a mechanical pencil was clipped haphazardly to his pants belt loop. The shoestrings in his long, worn oxfords were two quite different shades of brown. He was much sloppier than he used to be, more wrinkled and shopworn and quite a bit skinnier, and sometimes he didn’t seem to know that she was talking to him, but he was her father. He would never be anything other than that. Even if he had done the worst possible things for dubious reasons, even if he had ended up destroying the very things he was trying to protect, he had loved her and cared for her and excused her flaws and faults since the moment she was born. And he continued to watch over her with the kind of firm devotion any real god should show, but rarely does. In return, she gave him this: immunity from accusation and a firm pedestal on which to stand, above and immortal. Was that too much to ask? But it didn’t really matter, this question or its answer, because she knew that as much as she might want to, much as she might try to, she would never really be able to see him any differently—or feel any differently about him, either—no matter what.

Their new shoes were blue with bright orange stripes and her father looked dubious even as he tied them snuggly around his feet. They had each gotten a pair of the exact same type, her father’s in size 11 and hers in size 7.5. He glanced down at his shoes again, as if they were a foreign appendage he wasn’t quite sure about. “Can we wait for the sun to go down a bit more? I only really like to do this once it gets good and dark.” Her father sat gingerly down in the broken lawn chair and Jory sat down in the grass next to him. The ground felt cool and solidly lumpy beneath her.

For a while neither of them said anything. They just sat and gazed
ahead of them at the sky. The evening air was soft and quiet, no lawn mowers or crickets or carnival music. There was the faint sound of a screen door opening and then slamming shut somewhere down the block.

“When I try to think about space going on forever,” Jory said, clearing her throat, “I can’t really even picture it in my head. I can’t really believe it. I always imagine that there’s an edge or a stopping point somewhere.”

“No one can picture anything infinite.” Her father reached down and put his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze. “All we know are things with edges and ends. I think that’s why people get bothered by looking at the ocean sometimes, because they can’t really see the end of it. It’s too huge. That’s why the moon shots made such a difference—you know, the pictures Armstrong and Aldrin took of earth from out in space. All of a sudden we got to see the edges of our world, and I think it made everything seem both smaller and bigger all at the same time.”

“Is that why you believe in God? Because it gives things edges?”

“No,” said her father. “I believe in God because it dissolves the edges.” He removed his hand from her leg and Jory shivered slightly, the evening’s cool air seeming almost autumnlike. “If there’s a god, then there doesn’t have to be an end to things,” he said, “to space, to time, to life. Things can be bigger than whatever it is we’re merely able to see or measure.”

“But they already are,” said Jory. “Molecules and atoms and black holes and quarks. Everything is plenty huge even without God.”

“Well,” her father said, “yes, so to speak.”

“You always told me that space went on forever,” said Jory. “And that there were more stars than anyone could ever count no matter how long they went on counting.”

“That’s true,” her father said. “Pretty much.”

“And everything that’s dark is actually full of light, and all things that seem to be holding still are really moving, right?” The night sky was coming on in earnest now, its purpling dye flattening and darkening the enormous bowl that was upended over the earth.

“I’ve always believed that science and religion don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

“Grace says . . . Grace said . . . that science is just there to uncover the
watermark of God. That all of nature is merely the outward sign of an omnipotent being.”

“Yes,” he said. “Grace would be certain to correct us if we’d gone astray in our theological reasoning.”

This statement seemed to put a temporary end to their conversation.

The sky was now an almost midnight blue, and so dark that she had to strain to see her father’s face or even read his expression. Was this what faith was? Just a believing and hoping and trusting in something, regardless of the evidence to the contrary? And if so, what kind of idiotic belief system was that? The sky suddenly seemed to bend or slip, revealing a radiant white slice of moon where before there had been only darkness. It reminded Jory of a lily’s trumpet just beginning to unfurl.

“Jory—do you think I’ve done wrong by you girls?”

Her father was looking at her in a new, oddly fearful way, and waiting hopefully for her response.

How was it possible to care deeply about people and not hurt them? To touch them and not leave terrible marks? Her father said that even meteors left fingerprints: imprints as distinct and specific as those produced by human hands, little rills or valleys that revealed the meteor’s size and weight and velocity. And that sometimes if a falling star was large enough, its impact could change a planet’s course forever—that simply by touching the planet’s surface it could eternally alter its course through space.

“I love you, Dad,” she said, and as she said it she realized that this was suddenly, utterly, and inviolably true. She hoped that this one small truth might be answer enough to make up for the scars that his loving, and hers, had already left behind.

Her father’s shy smile bloomed at her through the dusk. “Well,” he said, giving his lawn chair’s armrest a gentle tap, “we might as well give these fancy new shoes of ours a trial run.” He stood up and swung his arms above his head. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start out slow and just see how it goes.”

The two of them now, father and daughter, began jogging around the perimeter of the backyard, next to each other in the nighttime air. Nothing seemed important enough to say. Jory listened to her father’s
breathing and felt an awkward sense of intimacy with this human body running so close beside her, deliberately matching its strides to hers. She could hear, but no longer see, his footsteps, so she had to trust that he knew the way, and that any of the ground’s rough spots or upheavals had already been worn away by years and years of her father tracing his careful, deliberate orbit through the darkness.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to my phenomenal agent, PJ Mark, whose sharp-eyed vision for this book enhanced its scope and meaning in ways both great and small, and to Marya Spence for her excellent revision suggestions. Endless thanks are due my editor, the extraordinary Allison Lorentzen; her wisdom and encouragement made the editorial process surprisingly pain free. I am also grateful to Diego Nuñez and to my copyeditors and proofreaders at Viking for their tireless attention. And an enormous thank you goes to Paul Buckley for his amazing design work, which, along with Alessandro Gottardo’s evocative illustration, made the book’s cover a thing of genuine beauty.

I am forever grateful to the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, to Elizabeth Tallent, my beloved John L’Heureux, and particularly Tobias Wolff, who helped me immeasurably with the first draft of this story. Thanks go, too, to the University of Virginia and its excellent instructors: John Casey, Ann Beattie, and the wondrous Deborah Eisenberg.

I also want to thank Bill Clegg and Michelle Velasco, two early readers of my manuscript, for their many insightful comments. I am ever beholden to Andrew Altschul, Scott Hutchins, and Josh Weil, whose continued friendship, generosity, and aid I treasure highly.

To my sisters, Constance Ford and Gail Roberts, who shared with me many of the experiences portrayed on these pages, I owe a deep debt of gratitude and love that cannot be adequately expressed here. This is equally true of my obligation to Tim Brelinski, whose assistance has been wise, unfailing, and inexhaustible. And to Max Boyd, my child and chief adviser, my son and fundamental support system, goes all my love and more besides.

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BOOK: The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel
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