The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (34 page)

Tabitha shrugged and made loopy-loopy circles in the air with her fingers. “Want a fluffernutter? I’m just hungry all the time.” She stepped around her mother and headed for the kitchen. She was there when the phone rang. “What,” she said, her mouth gluey with marshmallow.

“Hi, is that Tabitha?” Caleb? Caleb! thought Tabitha, her heart leaping up.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Jeremy Carr.”

“Oh. What?”

“I just got back from the funeral and there was a message from your brother on my machine. Is he there?”

“You don’t mean Hogan,” she guessed.

“Right. I mean Kirk.”

She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. She thought that guys being gay was a waste of good cock, but maybe they didn’t have good cocks and that was why they were gay. She didn’t care one way or the other. If everybody on TV was cool about it these days, she was, too. But Kirk was more than just some gay kid, he was her annoying baby brother and her responsibility, at least until Mom kicked the bucket and Family Services waded in. “What do you want him for?”

“Nothing,” said the choir dude. “Absolutely nothing. But he called me and asked to meet me this evening. I can’t. Would you tell him I can’t? I have a music rehearsal in the church tonight. For a wedding.”

“Oh,” said Tabitha, licking the back of the spoon. “Whose wedding?”

“Someone in our choir.”

She said, “Polly?”

“Yeah. Polly’s wedding. You know Polly?”

“Nah. Well, I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him I’m sorry,” said Jeremy, but he didn’t sound sorry.

“Sorry for what?” said Tabitha, and hung up.

She went back in the living room, the jar in one hand and the spoon in the other. “This is like marshmallow mucous,” she said.

“Who was that?” said Hogan, eyes trained on the TV. It was a rerun of
Gilligan’s Island.

“It was Kirk’s boyfriend. Would you tell Kirk when he comes home that Jeremy has a wedding rehearsal tonight in the church and he can’t make their date?”

“Goddamn it.” Hogan threw the channel changer at the TV screen so hard the glass spit, but Gilligan didn’t notice. “That faggot’s gonna get his ass handed to him. Where are you going?”

“Out. I need to see Linda Pearl about something very important to me.”

“I’m leaving at seven. I got the evening shift, the seven to eleven tonight.”

“Kirk’ll be home.”

“What if he’s not?”

“Just put a blanket on her and turn out the lights, how do I know? Really, Hogan, I’m only two years older than you, you expect me to figure out everything?”

“Should I get her some food? That toast is two days old.”

“She gets hungry enough, she eats it.”

Tabitha didn’t really need to see Linda Pearl. She didn’t want to go to the House of Beauty. She didn’t know what she wanted. There was a sense of things hinging within her, swinging this way and that. She was broad as a barge, full, capable, monstrous, thunderous, generous, judgmental. She walked along the side of the road and felt the world sink back to make room for her. Physically she wasn’t any larger, she knew; she might even, with all that nausea, have lost a few pounds. (Never a bad thing.) It was inside herself that she was larger.

Once, on the only family field trip they had ever taken, Mrs. Scales had bundled up Tabitha, Hogan, and Kirk, and brought them all the way to Boston. It was a celebration of some kind; maybe Hogan’s getting off of junior parole. They had stared with slack jaws at how large and specific the world was—all that green particularity between Thebes and Boston—almost six driving hours of it. TV served the world in very flat slices, like an animated placemat. Whereas in reality the world had a lot more chunk to it.

In Boston they had gone to the top of some skyscraper and Hogan had done some projectile snot-blowing out of his nose. They had seen that place that Paul Lynde had lived in before he shouted “The British are coming! The British are coming.” Not Paul Lynde—Paul Revere. Kirk had stolen nine packages of oyster crackers at some fish chowder place and put them on the tracks of the trolley to make crumbs. Then their mother had brought them to the Mothership of the Christian Scientists. It was a modern all-concrete plaza that still looked like its architectural drawing; nothing in it had gotten spray-painted with graffiti yet. Inside one of the older buildings, after they had listened to some lecture about the total stultifying boringness of Christian Science, they had been kidnapped and forced to take a tour. Deep inside one building they had come to a place called the Mapparium.

“It looks very Catholic,” said Mrs. Scales doubtfully, and at first she wouldn’t let her children go in.

“That’s just the stained glass,” said the guide. “Don’t mention Catholics to
us.”
So Mrs.

Scales had relented.

The Mapparium was a stained glass globe, about two stories high and two rooms wide, too. A map of the world in some year like 1936 or something. Every country in the world and all the oceans and seas between were made of curved stained glass puzzle pieces and fitted into place, and things were marked so you could find them if you knew what to look for. All the states were there, except Alaska, Hawaii, and Mexico weren’t states yet. You walked in a bridge across the dead middle space right inside the globe, and the outer skin was the glass, framed in lead, and lit by bulbs on the other side of the glass. It was weird, like the world was kind of like church, or church was kind of like the world. And either way, you were inside it.

Now Tabitha was walking along with the whole globe inside
her,
the whole brightly colored existence, all its impossible skins and layers and transparencies. It was hard to think about it. If she could only look in her own mouth she would see the universe and the stars, like the beginning of most movies, black night and white speckles; then zoom in to the galaxy, the solar system, the sun, the Milky Way, in some order or another, like nesting boxes, and the whole globe was in her, and in the globe was the eensy little baby with its little kicking feet, and the whole baby’s whole life was in there with it, and the whole world it would experience, it was all right there, all inside her. It made her feel a little queasy, to tell the truth, and as if the House of Beauty was really the place she should be going, if for the name alone. But she didn’t think that Linda Pearl Wasserman would make a very good godmother to a whole new galaxy cooking away inside her, even if Linda Pearl was first home with any new gossip and a fucking genius at feathering and layering.

She walked past Pastor Jakob Huyck, who with his usual timing just happened to be driving by. He rolled down his window and said, “Going somewhere?”

“Not going,” she called, “coming. I’m coming.” In an earlier month she would have said this sexily, but the sound in her own voice was more than sexy. It was godly.

She waved him by and kept walking, loving herself almost for the first time. She walked all the way to the gas station, thinking about everything and nothing at once.

JEREMY STOPPED BY the clinic to see Sean again. The argument about whether to tell Sean about Sister Alice hadn’t been won or lost before one of the old nuns had spilled the beans.

Sean had plunged into a gummier somnolence and the medics pumped into him an increased dosage of whatever it was. Tonight he lay groggily in his pillows, scarecrow’s limbs in place of his own. His eyes were closed.

Jeremy sat by him and hummed quietly. His mind wandered to all the usual haunts. He lost track of the time, eyes on Sean’s eroding face. He may even have dozed off for a minute or two. When he looked again, Sean’s eyes were open but his attention unsteady.

“You could read to him,” said a night nurse. “His folks brought by some paperbacks.” Jeremy didn’t want to touch them, but he had to do something since Sean was so unresponsive. A bunch of dog-eared children’s novels. These were the things that Sean’s parents knew of their son. No
Honcho,
no
Blueboy,
but
The Wind in the Willows,
and
Charlotte’s Web,
and
Half Magic,
and some of the Narnia books. Sean’s name claimed them in an endearingly round, uneven attempt at the Palmer Method. Sean Kevin Riley. S. K. Riley. Father Sean Riley.

He opened a book and read aloud at random, but he couldn’t follow the words, and neither apparently could Sean, but at least it brought him around enough to croak, “Will you shut the fuck up?”

“The power of literature. Works every time. You’re up just in time for a quick hello and goodnight. I have to dash out soon to do a rehearsal. The dread Irene Menengest. Again.”

“Sing for me,” said Sean. So Jeremy obliged, lightly, faintly. Sean closed his eyes but when Jeremy stopped he said, “I’ll be out in time to make the New York trip, you know.”

“Counting on it.” He hoped the huskiness in his voice didn’t betray him.

“Don’t cancel because of me. Even if that’s the day they dust-to-dust me.”

“You’re insane. You’re raving. You’re nowhere near that.”

“It’s called dementia, sweetheart. Listen to me. We both know that Jeremy Carr can come up with a hundred and six reasons to cancel. That’s your special blessing. But don’t. I forbid it.

I’ll come back and haunt you. You know the only thing I regret is that we never slept together. It would have been so sweet.”

“Dementia, got it.”

“It’s all Willem, I know. Get yourself out of his poison shadow, will you? You’re sicker than I am but you could recover. I’d feel better going down the crapper if I knew you were going to do this.”

“I’m going to New York,” said Jeremy. “I am. Do you want me to swear to you on a stack of Bibles?”

“I don’t believe in the Bible. But you do. So yes.”

“I don’t have a stack.”

“You work in a church and consort with that coven of nuns. I’m holding you to it.”

“He isn’t trouble, Sean. You always imagine I’m sneaking around behind everyone’s backs—”

“No,” said Sean,
“you
always imagine it. Everyone can see it in your face. Including him.

Either fuck with him good and hard one last time or get out of here. I mean it.”

“I take your point.”

“No you don’t. Mr. Fortitude, Piety and Fear of the Lord. Get out of here. Now. I don’t want to see that pity on your weak-ass face. Visiting time is over.” Jeremy stood. “You, umm, want this book to read?”

Sean turned his face to the wall.

“I’m counting on you to come with me to New York, you hear,” said Jeremy.

“If I can’t make it, audition that high school kid Marty’s been telling me about.”

“You’ll make it. You’re too stubborn to trust me to do it without you.” He hoped that would bring some sort of grizzled smile to Sean’s face, to end on a convivial note, but Sean didn’t turn his head back to reveal anything.

Jeremy checked his watch, and cursed mildly. 7:40. He was supposed to meet Irene Menengest and her sister at 7:15. Irene insisted on a vocal run-through in the actual church building, and Francesca was coming to give feedback about enunciation, even though Jeremy had explained that the acoustics when the building was empty would be nothing like those on the day of the wedding. But Irene had bullied and Jeremy had given in.

Lucky that Father Mike agreed to leave the building unlocked following the Christmas-decorating committee meeting, Jeremy thought. But holy shit. Was I asleep in that chair for an
hour?
What, he berated himself, more avoidance? Sleeping rather than facing the hard fact—that seeing Francesca Handelaers always puts in me the most toxic feeling of worthlessness? And not because she’s smug, or superior, or monstrous—but because she’s none of those things. Because she’s generous, and talented, and attractive in a womanly way that even someone with homo-wiring can admire. Because she’s secure enough not to be threatened by me.

Who? Jeremy Carr? That dear? Oh yes, the object of Willem’s amusing little diversion—we giggle about it all the time.

At least he wouldn’t be stuck alone with Irene, that vivisectionist.

Jeremy blinked. What a day. Sister Alice’s funeral in the morning, then the long drawn out business of the reception, a quick drop-by for some after-school tutoring of Ginnie Presley, a visit to Sean. No wonder he’d fallen asleep in the chair. Wasn’t enough enough?

He took a detour down Coeyman Street, since there was an ambulance siren bearing down on him from the north, and parked in the street behind the church, cutting through the parking lot on foot. A lot of folks hustling along the sidewalks; prayer night for the Pentecostals, maybe. Folks stood near the entrance of Cliffs of Zion, but looked westward, away from their own church. The light in the sky, the sense of atmospheric activity. How sleepy had he been?

The air crackled as if with canvas sails. Our Lady’s was on fire, burning from the sanctuary forward. The siren wasn’t an ambulance, it was a fire engine coming, and it wasn’t even here yet.

The people gathered weren’t Radical Radiants, they were local residents, crowding around the front door of the church, beating on it. “He’s here, he’s got keys,” called Old Lady Scarcese, seeing Jeremy. She was shivering in a house dress with a sweater tied around her waist. “Jeremy, someone’s in there, for the love of Jesus! Locked in there, maybe.”

“God God God God God—” He hit the door running, ran into it again. “Oh God Oh God.

Oh God.”

“Use your keys, don’t you have keys!” screamed Old Lady Scarcese.

“No, Father Mike was going to leave the door open—”

“They were here doing Christmas decorating, I saw them a while ago. I thought they left but someone else said they saw someone go in—”

What had he been thinking? Father Mike never left the front door open. He ran around the back of the church. But the sanctuary door was framed in flames; he couldn’t even get near it.

“Tell the fire guys,” he called to no one in particular. The third door was on the parking lot side; that one led down to the kitchen and up to the nave and the Reconciliation Room. On the ice, one foot went out from under him; he fell, ripping the knees open in his trousers; he scrambled up, flailing at the edge of a bush. A canister shoved under that bush, a nozzled metal canister for carrying gasoline.