The Grave of God's Daughter (20 page)

Martin fidgeted with the tip of the sheet. “I have to ask you a question, but I don’t want you to get mad.”

“Ask.”

“How did you know?”

“About Leonard?”

He nodded and dug his hands under his armpits to warm them.

“Does it matter? You know what I’m going to say.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re going to say.
You just do.
But how? I never just know. Never.”

“I’m not sure. It’s like a feeling. But it feels real. And I believe it.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“You don’t get scared that your feelings aren’t telling you the truth? What if they’re lying?”

The awful possibility that I was deceiving myself terrified me. If I’d let myself believe that could be, I would have been inconsolable.

“You can lie to other people, but you can’t lie to yourself,” I replied, hoping to convince both of us.

“Why?”

“We’re just made that way.”

That was enough to satisfy Martin. He blew on his hands one last time, huddled next to me, and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry I told about Leonard.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“But I am. I want God to know I’m sorry. And you.”

“He knows.”

Sleep came quickly, then I awoke in the night to a shuffling sound. At first, I thought it was the wind against the rear wall of the apartment, though that was such a familiar noise it shouldn’t have woken me. A new thought arose, replacing reason. I pictured the laundry on the lines out back scraping at the wall, trying to get in and clawing to get at me as it had done before. I clenched my eyes to cast off the image.

The blanket was still covering my head, creating a tent and muffling the sound. The air inside was congested, nearly
unbreathable. I tipped up the blanket’s edge to vent it and discovered that the sound that had woken me was coming from inside the apartment.

I didn’t dare move. I balanced the blanket on the tips of my fingers and peeked through a gap in the covers where Martin’s shoulder had raised them. The room was too dark to discern anything other than sound, the noise of cloth sliding over cloth, the thump of treading feet, then the crisp click of the front door unlocking.

The door opened little more than a sliver, but in the half-light I could make out a figure, shoulders hunched, head wrapped in a scarf. It was the unmistakable silhouette of my mother. She slipped into the night and disappeared.

My father was at the mill finishing his shift, so she wasn’t going to the Slipper in search of him. Then where? To find Leonard? I wondered. She had kept his visit a secret, just as I had. Would she know where to find him if no one else did? What if she was going to see another man, the lover I had imagined before?

The idea of that didn’t ring true, but it clanged in my head nonetheless. Faces of men I had seen in the street or at church or coming out of the salt plant swam before me, features blending. If she had taken a lover, that would mean she’d found someone to show love to, a person rather than her lost painting. That would also mean there was hope, a hope of that love spreading. That possibility could have kept me warm all night. I would have torn off the blankets, even my nightdress, if I thought the chance existed, and let it wrap me in its heat.

I
MUST HAVE LAIN THERE
for hours that night, waiting up, trying to talk myself into believing that my mother was with a lover. Sleep overtook me and I woke with a start the next morning to the same shuffling sound. It was my mother, fully dressed, busy at the sink, sunlight streaming in from the window beyond her.

I grabbed the blanket to push it aside, forgetting the blisters, and the pain in my palms made me cringe. My mother turned. I feigned a yawn as cover, stretching out my arms, hands down to hide the burns.

“Wake your brother. I need to be at the church early today.”

Her coat and scarf were hung in their usual place, her shoes right where they always were.

I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed her late-night departure.

“Wake up, Marty,” I said, prodding him with my elbow.

Martin sat up and let out an exaggerated yawn as fake as mine. He’d only been pretending to be asleep and had heard what my mother said.

“All right, I’m awake,” he said, affecting a groggy voice.

“You can have the washroom first,” I told him. I always let him go ahead of me, that way he could get into his clothes and stand by the stove to warm himself while we waited for breakfast.

“No, you go first,” Martin said. “I’ll wait.”

My mother, who usually noticed everything, seemed oblivious to the change. She was at the table making sandwiches for our lunch.

“All right,” I agreed, unsure as to what Martin was up to. He got out of bed so I wouldn’t have to crawl over him and I went to the closet for my clothes, then recalled that my mother had washed them the night before to rid them of the mud.

“They’re outside on the line,” she said without looking up from the sandwiches. “I’ll go and get them.”

She headed out the door and it dawned on me that she hadn’t put my clothes outside the night before. She’d only left them hanging on the edge of the sink.

Was that where she went? Was that all?

With my mother outside, Martin and I were alone in the apartment. “What are you up to?” I demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“I know you were awake.” Martin’s face revealed his disappointment. He thought he’d fooled us. “Why were you pretending?”

“I wanted to hear what she would say if she thought I was sleep
ing,” he confessed. “I wanted to see if she’d say she was mad at me for telling about Leonard. I thought maybe she would tell you.”

Such a confidence was beyond my mother. Martin was paying me an undue compliment to suggest that was possible.

“She wouldn’t say anything, least of all to me,” I told him, as I began to make our bed.

“It’s like she’s always thinking about something, but she won’t say what. It kind of scares me,” Martin admitted, standing close. “Does it scare you?”

I shook the blanket out and let it drift down to the mattress to lay flat, erasing any trace that we had slept there and that I had spent most of the night wondering where my mother had gone. “Yes,” I told Martin. “It scares me too.”

“What do you think it is, the thing she’s thinking about?”

“I wouldn’t know.” It was the truth, so my voice did not betray me enough to make Martin doubt me.

“Do you think she’s thinking about Swatka Pani?”

I shrugged. “Help me tuck in the blanket.”

“Maybe she feels bad about her being dead.”

The door opened and my mother entered, my school clothes folded neatly over her arm. “You’re not dressed yet,” she said to Martin.

“He was helping me with the bed.”

“Well, you’re finished now. Go on and change. Both of you.”

I nodded for Martin to go into the washroom first, then I was left alone with my mother. She set my clothes on the table in a tidy stack. She must have stood out in the cold folding them as she took them off the laundry line. Such patience, such care, but for what? For me to unfold them and put them on. Her neatness
always seemed like such a waste to me, a useless attempt to make what we had appear better than it was. Hand-me-down clothes were still hand-me-downs no matter how clean they were.

“I got most of the stains out,” my mother said after I picked up the clothes. A night in the cold air left the wool of my sweater brittle. The pleats of the skirt were stiff. “But there was something on your skirt. It looks like dried blood.” She was setting out the bowls for breakfast. Then she looked straight at me and asked, “Where did it come from?”

Until that moment, I’d never noticed how much I had to tilt my head upward to meet her gaze. I had to lift my chin in such a way that it made me aware of just how much taller she was, how small I was compared with her.

“School,” I lied. Even eye to eye with her, the lie was easy, supple on the tongue. The act no longer scared me as it once had. “I cut myself on a desk at school.”

My mother brushed a stray hair out of her eyes as though she wanted to get a full look at me or, perhaps, wanted me to get a full look at her. Then Martin came out of the washroom, dressed and patting down his hair instead of brushing it. “You can go in now.”

I scooped up my clothes, anxious to get away from my mother and from what she’d said. Through my nightdress I could feel frost lingering on the skirt. Had she really taken my clothes out in the night and that was all? The question squirmed in my mind for the rest of the day as I sat through school barely paying attention to my classes.

After lunch, Sister Bernadette was giving a lecture on church history. Under the fractured sound of her uneven English came a whisper.

“Psst.”

The noise was directed at me. A boy two rows behind me was trying to get my attention. I ignored him and faced front, afraid the sister would notice.

“Psst,” he hissed again. “I heard your brother’s a sissy.”

The insult shot through the air at me like an arrow. All of the children nearby heard it. I folded my arms and clenched my teeth, silently seething. Sister Bernadette prattled on, unable to detect the whispers over the clacking of her chalk against the board.

“I heard he plays with dolls and sews like a little girl.”

My fists curled into balls in spite of the pain in my palms.

“Your brother’s a girl. He’s a girl just like you.”

“Go to hell,” I shouted, whipping around to face the boy head-on.

The words had exploded from my mouth with enough force to send the boy back in his chair and leave him blinking. I should have been shocked too, I thought fleetingly. I should have been stunned at myself. I wasn’t. It was as if those words had been curled up and waiting for their chance to escape.

In the wake of my outburst, the classroom went quiet. It felt as if all of the air had been sucked out of the room, my lungs, everything. Sister Bernadette’s face stiffened, framed in the white wimple of her habit.

“Chodz tutaj!”
she commanded.

With a black-winged flourish of her robe, she was ordering me to the front of the room. It was an ominous sign that she had switched to Polish, and it left the other children murmuring.

“Cicho.”

Sister Bernadette demanded silence and the whispering stopped at once.

I walked to the front of the room on unsteady legs and stood next to the sister’s desk as she opened her top drawer, the creak of the wood saying everything. From the drawer, she retrieved a pair of rulers.

Unconsciously, I had slipped my hands from my sides to my back.

“Darzyc mi twoja reka.”

She was ordering me to put out my hands. I raised my arms slightly, then the sister grabbed them, digging her thumbs into the blistered flesh of my palms. I grimaced, stifling a moan.

“Ja jeszcze nie byc w kontakcie z.”

I haven’t even touched you yet.

The admonishment was as embarrassing as the punishment that followed, though hardly as painful. Sister Bernadette took up the rulers back to back and brought them down on the top of my left hand, then my right. The harsh thwacking of wood against skin made a sickening sound. My knuckles bore the brunt of the beating, the bones quivering below the thin layer of flesh. Each hand received three blows.

“Jeden za kazdy slowo.”

One time for every word.

Sister Bernadette dropped my hands as if I were the one hurting her, then quietly, so none of the other children could hear, the sister whispered to me in stunted English, “With a mouth like that, you’re the one who’ll be going to hell, girl.”

The sister put down the rulers and began the lesson right where she had left off, as though nothing had happened. I
returned to my seat, blind to the stares from my classmates, deaf to the sister’s voice, numb to everything but the relentless stinging of my hands, top and bottom.

I did not want to cry, not from the pain or the humiliation. I believed I deserved it, that I ought to suffer. I hoped that God had seen this and taken it as a penance for what I had done.

T
HE REST OF THE AFTERNOON
went by without event. The other children in class were on their best behavior, careful not to re-spark Sister Bernadette’s temper. I kept my eyes on the blackboard and my hands hidden in my lap. The tops were covered in welts and the skin on my knuckles was broken. I caught my classmates sneaking glances at me, all curious to see how bad my wounds were.

Once the school bell rang, no one moved for a few seconds. They were all waiting to see what I would do. Sister Bernadette finally had to urge the other children out of their seats, saying, “That was the bell, you know.”

While the others packed their books and got their coats from the cloakroom, I had to figure out how I was going to gather my things. My fingers had grown so stiff they refused to work. Lifting my notebook took maneuvering. I had to pinch the book’s spine between my fingertips like I was holding a grain of sand, then nudge it along with my other books into a pile. The rest of the children scurried out of the classroom, eager to get away from Sister Bernadette, then I was left alone with her while she sorted
through her papers, as she did at the end of each day. I couldn’t carry my books with me to the cloakroom, so I had to come back for them. It took me a full minute just to get my coat on, clumsily tugging the sleeves up with my thumbs. When I came back to retrieve my books, Sister Bernadette was at her desk, acting as if I wasn’t there. I slid the books to the edge of my desk so I could push them into my arms and hastened for the door.

“Just because your mother works in the church doesn’t mean God likes you any better than the rest,” Sister Bernadette intoned.

No,
I thought.
He likes me less.

Martin was nervously pacing outside my classroom door. “When you didn’t come for me, I came to find you.” His eyes went wide when he saw my hands. “What did you do?”