The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (30 page)

“I spoke to a doctor.” Her father said this without looking at her.

Jory felt a knot in her stomach tighten. “You did? What do you mean? What doctor?”

“He’s a sort of specialist.”

“A specialist?”

Her father paused. “A Christian psychiatrist.”

“You mean the one from Blackfoot?” Jory wasn’t sure why this suddenly seemed important.

Her father still wouldn’t look at her. He plucked a long blade of grass out from a crack in the concrete step. “I spoke to him confidentially, of course.”

Jory didn’t really know what this meant. “What did he say?”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter what he said. I just wanted you to know that I am not unaware of the problems here. And I
am
doing something, or as much of something as I can do.”

Jory could feel the knot of tightness in her stomach rising up toward her throat. “But what did he think was wrong with Grace?”

Her father paused. “As I already said, I don’t think his analysis is really worthy of discussion.”

Jory gave him a pleading look.

Her father stared briefly up at the sky. “He is under the belief that someone with Grace’s type of behavior would benefit from a particular sort of treatment.” Her father spread the blade of long grass out flat against his pant leg. “And medication.”

The tightness in Jory’s throat made it hard for her to speak. “You mean like tranquilizers?”

“Not exactly.” Her father brushed the blade of grass off his pant leg. “But this man is not an evangelical Christian, remember. He’s a Methodist and all his training was done at a large liberal university, where the empirical is the only thing that matters—so his analysis of things is somewhat shortsighted, to say the least.”

Jory’s father had gone to Harvard for both undergrad and his PhD, but that was somehow different. “
Mom’s
taking tranquilizers,” she said.

“Well, yes,” he said in a voice that betrayed his surprise, “but that’s only temporary. And I’ve already started cutting her dosage back.”

“Dr. Henry gave Grace a shot.”

“That was an emergency, Jory.”

“But what if it helped her? The treatment, I mean. The one this doctor was talking about.”

Jory’s father rearranged himself on the porch step with some difficulty. “I think we’ve discussed this topic thoroughly now, don’t you?” He started to stand.

“But if it
helped
her.”

Her father made a sudden grimace, as if he had bitten down on something sharp. “You don’t understand, Jory. She would have to be sent to . . . she would have to go to a hospital . . . and be hospitalized.”

“At
Blackfoot
?”

The screen door opened and Grace walked out onto the porch. Jory and her father grew quiet. “So,” said Grace, looking from one of them to the other. “Who’s being sent to Blackfoot?”

“No one,” said their father, pulling himself up by the porch railing. “No one is being sent anywhere. It was just a figure of speech.”

“Like a metaphor?” Grace cocked her head. She stared at her father.

“Yes,” he said. “Sort of. So, you know what? I just remembered that I have some groceries out in the car. Who wants to help me bring them in?” He tried to smile at the two of them. “Any volunteers?”

J
ory peered at herself in Henry’s old rectangular mirror. Mrs. Kleinfelter had loaned her an old eyebrow pencil and Jory had spent half an hour giving herself some very Egyptian-looking eyes. Or what she hoped were Egyptian-looking eyes. She had seen a picture in Rhea’s
Seventeen
magazine of this girl with amazing sort of bat-wing eyeliner extending from the corners of her eyes and, well, now Jory looked quite different. A little smudgy and strange, but hopefully exotic and possibly even much older. She was wearing a paisley-flowered drawstring blouse that Rhea had given her along with a headband she had made herself out of a strip of felt and a peacock feather. She also had on her rust-colored bell-bottoms, her moccasins, and a wide brown belt that had belonged to Mrs. Kleinfelter’s husband. Plus, she had plaited two little tiny braids in her hair on either side of her face and secured them with crochet thread strung with little beads. She was going for the Egyptian-hippie look. Or maybe the Egyptian-Indian-hippie look.

Grace had given no thought whatsoever to her look, unless you counted looking like a pregnant concentration camp victim. Grace, in fact, was sitting downstairs in the kitchen reading her King James Bible, wearing the same old brown dress she had been wearing for the past five or six weeks.

“What do you think?” Jory said, twirling once around for Grace’s benefit.

Grace ran a hand up and over her bristly hair. It had apparently become a habit. “Halloween is a pagan holiday that celebrates evil behavior. And you’re wearing an awful lot of eye makeup.”

“Oh, don’t be a poop,” said Jory, and she sat down breathlessly at the kitchen table. She was too excited to be affected by her sister’s
punctiliousness. Even school had been fun today! They hadn’t been allowed to wear real costumes because of what had happened with an Indian tomahawk the year before, but there had been candy in homeroom and the school secretary had played “The Monster Mash” over the intercom and the bus driver had on a long blond wig and devil horns. Even Mrs. Cross had worn skeleton earrings. Everything had been wonderful until someone lit a smoke bomb in the girls’ lavatory and someone else smashed a pumpkin through the windshield of Mr. Mullinix’s Pontiac. Then sixth period was canceled and school was let out early. Jory tried to give Grace her most winsome look. “Oh, please! You can come too. We used to go trick-or-treating all the time when we were little.”

“That was before.”

“Mom and Dad always let us go.”

“Well, maybe they shouldn’t have,” said Grace. “It probably sends the wrong message to unbelievers when they see Christians celebrating something associated so closely with Satan.”

“Oh—argh!” said Jory, jumping up from the table. “You
are
a complete drag, do you know that?”

“You know what the Tao says,” Grace said, putting her finger in her Bible.
“Let the world pass as it may
.
Act and it is ruined, grab and it is gone.”

“What?”

“The Great Way is very smooth, but the people love the bypaths.”

“Cut it out, Grace.”

“Seriously, though, Jory. I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“Well, it’s not like you can stop me.” Jory readjusted her hair band.

Grace appeared unmoved by this statement. “I suppose not,” she said. “Unless I called Dad.” She seemed to momentarily weigh this possibility.

“You wouldn’t do that,” said Jory.

“No,” said Grace. “Probably not.”

Grace had never, ever told on Jory, not even when they were little and Jory had done a variety of supposedly bad things. The one thing Grace wasn’t was a tattletale. Jory and Frances had happily told on each other many a time, but not Grace. Not telling was evidently part of her moral code.

“So come with me and be my chaperone. Make sure I stay out of trouble.” Jory bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. “Please?”

“I don’t know,” said Grip. “Are you a Moonie, or someone with cancer?”

“Ha ha. Very funny,” said Grace. “I am not in costume.”

“Well, you’ve certainly done something interesting with your hair.” Grip’s widened eyes took in the ruined landscape of Grace’s scalp. He appeared more than a little startled. “What’s up with that?”

“How about me?” Jory quickly inserted herself between them, put her hand on her hip, and turned her face so that it was in profile.

“Wow. Hm. You are . . . I don’t know, Penelope Tree?”

Jory’s face fell. “Who?”

“A very groovy model person from Great Britain. At least, I think she’s from Great Britain. Maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s American. I forget.”

“I’m supposed to be an Egyptian-Indian-hippie-princess.”

“That’s just what I said.” Grip smiled at Jory. “You look perfect.” He tilted his head at her. “It’s kind of like looking into the future.”

Jory had to turn around and pretend to be fixing the tie on her blouse. She could feel a huge smile rising up through her whole body.

“Well, it’s obvious what
you
are,” said Grace. And it was. Grip was an ice cream man. He was The Ice Cream Man. He had slicked his hair back beneath one of those old white paper army-shaped hats. The kind that could be folded flat and put in your back pocket. And he was wearing spotlessly white creased pants and a white short-sleeved button-down shirt that had
Larry
written on the right breast pocket. Jory felt almost shy around him. He was Grip, but a cleaner and older and maybe richer version, like a Grip who was living an entirely different life.

“All righty,” he said. “Ladies—Egyptian and otherwise—your chariot awaits.”

Jory sat in the back of the truck next to the freezer. The last time she had sat back there, Frances had been in the front and they had gone swimming with Grip in the canal. Jory blushed in the darkness just thinking about it. She had been so young and naive. She had known nothing about anything! It had been four—no, almost five months ago. A lifetime.

She leaned forward. “Grace has been reading your Tao stuff,” she said.

“Really?” said Grip. “I’m surprised.” Jory could see him smiling, even from where she was sitting.

“Govern a nation as you would fry a small fish,”
said Grace. “That’s my favorite one.”

Grip clucked his tongue. “Ah,” he said. “You’re making fun. I see how it is.”

“I’m not,” said Grace. “I think it’s actually somewhat profound.”

“Right,” said Grip. “Okay, well, it’s a rule that whoever sits in front has to learn to copilot the craft. Jory knows how, Frances knows how, so now it’s your turn.”

“Oh, no,” said Grace, and put her hands up to her face. “I don’t know how to drive anything.”

“Not yet, you don’t. But the night is young.”

“Don’t we have lots of things we’re supposed to be doing?”

“Yes, and the first one on the agenda is teaching you how to shift.”

“
Frances
knows how to drive the truck?”

Jory leaned back and peered out the small oval rear window at the sky. Sure enough, there was the moon, big and fat and glowing, looking down at the world with its sad eyes and sorrowful mouth. She remembered the Childcraft books her father had read to them when she was little. In those stories the moon was less mournful and more scary—a half-sentient being who was slightly evil and often grinning or maliciously winking at the tiny humans below. It seemed to know things that no human would be happy to know, and it seemed to want to tell these things—to eagerly open its mouth and let the secrets spill forth in a bright spray of liquid silver that would turn to solid coins as they fell to earth, but still burned like fire if you tried to pick them up.

And if you went up to the moon, if you rowed a green-bottomed boat through the sky or straddled a broom (like certain Childcraft creatures: cats and cows and wicked women and spoons), you came back terribly changed, or not at all. The moon exacted a heavy price for its dark knowledge. What it whispered in your ear, you could never unhear. But Jory longed to be told. And she was terrified of being told. And once you were told, well . . . who knew? Who knew?

Owls and bats and all shades of black and midnight blue. The planet
Pluto. A wizard’s pointy hat. A ball stamped with gold stars rolling into a room all by itself. A girl with one striped sock living all alone in a two-story house on the edge of nowhere. An apple so neon green it glowed, with one bite missing.

“The clutch is the hardest part,” Grip was saying. “We’ll wait and try that on the way home.”

Grace refused to say anything. She was entirely intent on shifting into third.

“Where are we going to go?” Jory peered out the window at each of the darkened houses, hoping to see jack-o’-lanterns and kids in ghoulish costumes running by.

“Well,” said Grip, pitching his voice girlishly high and pretending to flip his hair behind his back, “I hear there’s a really superior spook house out at Dave VanManen’s. Evidently Dave’s dad is letting him use their barn and everything and it’s going to be really fun and cool and majorly scary.”

Grace turned around and gave Jory a dark look. “Jory, we cannot go to the ACA party.”

“Why not?” Jory asked.

Grace said nothing.

Jory leaned forward. “What if we just went for a little bit? Just long enough to say hi to people.”

Grace continued saying nothing.

Jory leaned back. “It was just a thought.”

“Hey,” said Grip. “We could go out to Hope House. You know, that great big old blue house on Chicken Dinner Road.”

“The
hippie house
?” Jory leaned forward again. “The one with the painted eye on the front?”

“You know those people?” There was a note of dismay in Grace’s voice.

“Sure. A little bit.” Grip grinned at Grace. “Hippies like ice cream too.” He turned and glanced back at Jory. “What do you say, Miss Penelope—shall we take a little look-see?”

“Are you sure this is the kind of place we should be going?” Jory could almost hear Grace raising her eyebrows.

“Oh, I think it’s pretty safe. Besides, you’ll be with me, right?”

“I want to go,” said Jory. “Anyway, I think I do. It’s Hallo
ween
,” she said.

“That’s the spirit.” Grip made a wide left-hand turn and headed down a slightly bumpy dirt-packed road. “It’s down here on the right somewhere. I remember it being past the old water tower a little ways.”

The ice cream truck bounced along down the long dirt road and Jory was forced to hold on to the headband’s peacock feather that she had pilfered from a box in Henry’s basement. They drove along for maybe a mile or two as the dirt road got progressively narrower and less navigable, with Jory bumping her head on the truck’s ceiling every little bit.

“Okay,” said Grip. “That’s it up there.” He pointed out the windshield to the right.

“Oh,” said Jory. “Look. They’re having a bonfire. Or something.” She shivered slightly.

Grip pulled the truck into some kind of a long, weedy driveway that was overhung by several large, drooping willow trees. He stopped the truck next to an old school bus painted a swirling lilac purple. The bus had a small-shingled roof affixed to the top of it, and a large ropy hammock was strung between the bus’s bumper and one of the willow trees.

“Whoa,” said Jory, getting out of the truck. She wasted only a moment’s notice on the purple bus. The hippie house itself was several shades of blue and had a huge kohl-lined eye painted directly above its front door. “Look—it has an eye just like our house,” Jory said.

“
Our
house has an eye?” Grace stumbled over something in the grass and Grip grabbed her arm to steady her.

“It’s the third eye,” Grip said. “A symbol of enlightenment or wisdom.”

“More Buddhism, I suppose.” Grace readjusted her dress front.

Several large glowing metal stars hung down from the porch’s overhang. Jory went up the porch steps and gazed reverently at the stars.

“They’re punched tin, I think,” said Grip. He lifted one by its bottom point. “See? With lit candles inside.”

“Oh,” said Jory, pointing at the house’s front window. Hanging just inside it was a large metal moon: bronze colored and crescent shaped and holding a large golden candle in its horn. “This is so beautiful!”