The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (37 page)

Or Power: was that too corny? But Power Scales sounded like something used over at the paper mill.

She was trying to be good, somehow, and Linda Pearl made her feel sullied and sour.

“Just you do Polly up the way she wants,” said Tabitha. “I gotta go. Hair spray and doughnuts are making me yucko.”

“I got a constitutional right to express my rage,” said Linda Pearl. “No one can take that away from me. I’m your loyal friend even if you’re being Miss Wimpella, the Pagan Queen of Christian Martyrs.”

Tabitha walked home, one step after the other, watching her feet. Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, you break the devil’s back. Which crack was which—or were
they the same?
Spooky. She shattered dozens of unidentified vertebrae before she reached the corner.

No police cars loitered in front of the Scales house, but Pastor Huyck’s car squatted there.

Shit. The more forcefully tender he got, the more he gave her the willies. She couldn’t stand that pious gaze. She pictured smashing his face with a baseball bat, but realized that maybe her thoughts of braining her mother were becoming a habit. Watch it, baby, she said to herself. There is a beginning and an ending cooking up, so mind your step.

She and the unknown universe trudged through the unshoveled walk up to the front door and pushed in.

She was glad to see that her mother wasn’t sacked out on the floor of the living room.

Kirk must have dragged her into her bedroom in case the cops came back. Pastor Huyck weighed down the middle of the sofa, the far ends of both seat cushions elevating three or four inches.

Tabitha suppressed the urge to push right by him without a hello. He could be undercover for the cops. “The gifts of the season!” said Pastor Huyck, eyeing her breasts.

“Who let you in?” she said, as graciously as she could.

“I’d say that Mother did.” For an instant she thought he meant it, and her heart lilted even though she’d been readying to ice her mother. “She came to me in a dream just as she came to me in real life, and said, Be my pastor. Take care of my little girl.”

“Oh, dreams. That figures. She doesn’t get around much in real life.”

“I’m not one for dream visitations,” said Pastor Huyck, a holiday ruddiness on his face.

“This was however a potent experience. You were in it.”

“Oooh.” Tabitha felt as if she’d just found ants in the sugar.

“This is a very holy time. I’ve come to see if I can help getting Mother to services tomorrow night.”

“She might come to you in a dream, but she’s pretty useless on her legs now. Hell in a handbasket, maybe, but you’d need a pretty hefty handbasket. She’s not going anywhere fast.”

“The rewards of the holy feast might revive her.”

“She has a thing about your church now.” Tabitha tried to be as kind as she could. “She bucked and clawed and twisted when we tried to bring her there. You know that.”

“You’ve said she’s less mobile. She’d be less resistant now.”

“That’d be taking advantage. Why not just let her be.”

“You come then. Come in Mother’s place. Come home. Come here.” He patted the sofa beside him. “You’ve been carrying this load too long, Tabitha, and I’ve been a bad pastor to you.

You look like you need a holiday hug. Sit down.”

“I, um, can’t.” She looked about. “I got to, got to—” Her eye fell on a dusty photo album that had fallen off a heap of pirated videos of
X-Files
that Hog must’ve been rooting through.

“I’ve been looking for a picture.”

She lunged for the book as Pastor Huyck got up. The sofa cushions sighed. “I’ll help you look.”

“I can look myself.” She put it down on the side table and began to flip pages. Too bad there wasn’t a recipe for poison communion bread in here. She felt him enter her airspace, and smelled him, a thunderhead of Old Spice masking a hint of vinegar. Or was that something sweetly alcoholic, like sherry?

“What’re you looking for?” He put one set of gorilla knuckles on the tabletop beside the book, and the other set on her shoulder. He massed against the back of her knees to her shoulder blade. She could feel the car keys in his left pocket as he began to rotate his body more centrally to line up with her spine.

“This, here it is.” At random she tore out an old snapshot, the kind from beyond time, with rippled white edges, when the world could be remembered only in black and white.

“Who is it?”

She could hardly talk. “It’s Grandmother Prelutski, my mom’s mother. Don’t do that.” He put his chin on her shoulder, squinting. “She looks pretty fierce.”

“Mom called her Mother Stalin. She raised Mom alone ‘cause her husband took off to shack up with some filthy whore from Hattiesburg, Virginia.’”

“Yet Mother learned to be a good mother from her.”

“Well, that’s debatable. Stop that.”

His lips were in her hair and his left hand had reached her breast. She couldn’t think. But maybe this wasn’t the time for thinking. Shy of a wrench, shy of a convenient portable gas can

and a match, she reached for the only thing she had, the photo album. She closed it with both hands and sighed as if remembering the crimes of her family background, and then she heaved it up backhand right against Pastor Huyck’s face. It wasn’t heavy enough to hurt much but it scraped his glasses off his face, and as he turned to grab them she ducked out under his left arm.

Then she hit him with a better blow. “If I take Mom to church tomorrow night, we’re going to the Catholics. That’s where Mom seems to be drawn, and while she’s down and out I guess I’m the man of the family. And if you touch me again I’ll tell everyone you been hitting on me.”

“You’re misunderstanding my ministry.”

“Take a hike. Huyck.” By now she’d got across the room and had armed herself with a real fire poker they kept by the fake fireplace.

He left in a righteous sulk at, she thought of it and laughed, a goodly pace.

“Merry Christmas, by the way,” she called after him.

Kirk peered out of the bathroom and whispered, “Is he gone yet?”

“You could’ve come out. He was pestering me like a pervert.”

“I was just about to. After I finished my nails.”

“Hog would’ve cracked his honking skull. He’s the only real hero round here.”

“I know.” Kirk sounded sad. “I’ve seen him in action.”

Can’t be easy to be Kirk, she thought. She went in and sat on her mother’s bed. Mrs.

Scales lay with open eyes facing the closet door. Her knees were drawn closer to her chin, but her breathing seemed calm. The skin on her face was slack and drooped bed-ward.

She was starting to be smaller than Tabitha. She was curling herself together, knitting fingers together, tucking ankles toward her rear end, arching her neck to complete the circle toward her bent knees. A fossil of herself, but still breathing; fragile and helpless as a baby. How would Tabitha ever manage both her own new baby and this old one too?

She wanted to kill it and she wanted to save it—this mother baby, not her own. How to do both things at once? Her desperate words to Pastor Huyck rang in her mind. Maybe I’ll get Kirk and Hogan to help. I’ll take Mom to the Catholic mass, wherever it’s going to be, and leave her there. A baby on the doorstep of the church. She won’t be my responsibility any more. It makes perfect sense. Look: Mom has been driven to lie in the basement of that Catholic church, entombed there; she’s scrabbled and bit her way there. I’ll give her what she wants. My Christmas present to her.

She called the rectory of Our Lady’s. A recording announced where the midnight mass was being held. Concert starting at 11:15 p.m. Well, she’d get there earlier. She’d have to explain enough to get her brothers’ help. And since they were both looking jittery these days, she ought to be able to swing it.

In fact, her brothers were oddly compliant. Maybe they had worked together to set fire to the church?
That
would be a kind of brotherly cooperation she hadn’t seen before. Or maybe it was merely clear that now they were all in this together, because if the police came and put one of them in juvenile court, it would be bad for them all. If she could only lift the burden of their mother off her shoulders, she could begin to take care of her brothers. It would be good practice for when her own baby became a satanic teenager.

AT ABOUT 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve the Scales children went into their mother’s bedroom. First they propped her into a sitting position. Tabitha washed her mother and cleaned her up, top to bottom. Her mother offered no resistance. The boys looked the other way during the worst of it, and Tabitha wished she could too, but this was the last indignity, she hoped. She lifted her mother’s breasts and set them gently in place in the bra to avoid pinching, and latched the bra behind. Doing the panties and the slip was going to be, she feared, unforgettable. Then the boys turned around to help with the blouse and the skirt, elephantine red flowers with avaricious black interiors. “Boy, isn’t there such a thing as enough with Georgia O’Keeffe already?” said Kirk.

Tabitha didn’t get it, didn’t try. “Jewelry?”

“Skip it, why bother?” said Hogan.

“The black jet beads, in a double loop,” Kirk declared without going over to the jewelry box to find out what was there. Guess he knew.

“I was thinking something Christmas-y,” said Tabitha.

“We can stick holly in her fucking ears,” said Hogan. “Let’s get this over with.”

“All right then,” said Tabitha, “on the count of three.”

They hoisted her up. With coaxing, her legs straightened out, which was something of a relief; Tabitha had been afraid they were going to be stuck in that pretzel position. Mrs. Scales was unsteady, though. Hogan and Tabitha kept on either side of her. Kirk darted ahead to kick the footstool out of the way, turn off the TV, and open the front door. It was a snowy night; a Bing Crosby white Christmas with Lake Ontario wind. They couldn’t even see the car until they were halfway down the walk. Snow had fallen in the smashed rear window.

“Going to church, Mom,” said Tabitha. “Just where you like it.” They put her in the front seat and arranged the seat belt carefully. Suddenly, caution at every turn. Fold the skirt neatly under her; settle her hands together. Are you all right? Comfy?

Odd how you could change, or was it just a Christmas mood? She couldn’t believe she’d considered hitting her mother with a wrench. What if she’d hurt her? The dear thing. The dear, knotted, gnarled, hateful thing.

They’d be there in what, thirty minutes maybe, going slowly because of the blowing snow.

Tabitha hadn’t figured on the choir. If the concert was going to start at 11:15, she guessed that getting there by 10:30 would allow plenty of time to set her mother down and disappear.

Someone would find the old bat within forty-five minutes. But when Tabitha pulled the car up to the convent, old nuns in their witchy drag were propped up against the front doors, welcoming people.

Bravely she got out and ducked inside to case the joint. The vestibule and front hall of the convent were busy with violins tuning and a flutist trilling like a demented parakeet. The doors to the chapel, across the corridor and opposite the front door, were flung open, so Tabitha peered inside. The choir was augmented by a trumpet and a clarinet and a set of snare drums that read

“The Harmony Brothers” on its face, and Jeremy Carr was leading a bunch of giddily dressed choir members in warm-up vocal calisthenics. Shit. She should have come an hour earlier.

Think, think. If the nuns were gathered in a black cotton flurry in the front, maybe the back of the convent was deserted. Mom didn’t actually have to be on the doorstep of the church, did she? She could be left at the kitchen entrance. New supplies. Jeremy had said that this was a place that old nuns went to die. Maybe Mom could become a nun in order to qualify for the retirement benefits. “Where are you going?” said Hogan irritably, but Tabitha started the engine again without answering. She pulled the car along the entrance drive until she saw a service road veer off. She threaded the car through overgrown hedges, which shook fistfuls of grainy snow onto the windshield.

The first door she came to was propped ajar with a music stand. A couple of cigarette butts had been flicked in the boot-stamped ground. “Here, Hog. Smoking nuns left the door open. A Christmas miracle.”

The lighted doorway revealed, inside, a landing and a set of steps. One flight led up to the chapel and a glorious misshapen noise of music. Another flight led down.

“Near enough,” said Tabitha. “Let’s just spread out Mom’s coat and set her here on the landing. She can listen to the music and she’ll be perfectly happy.”

“She’ll fall down the stairs,” said Kirk.

“She can’t stand by herself, she’s not competent enough to fall.” But their mother made a motion with her chin—the first sign of expression in eight or ten days—toward the stairs leading down into the dark.

“She’s looking for that refrigerator again,” said Kirk. “This is a different place, Mom.”

“Unngh,” said their mother.

“Oh, Lord,” said Tabitha. She didn’t want her mother to go suddenly vocal on her, not just when they were trying to tiptoe away. “Okay, come on, downstairs then. Just take it easy.” The light from the stairwell went only so far. Once they were at the bottom of the stairs, though, they could see the low space ahead, because a grate in the ceiling let down some light and music from the chapel upstairs. “Look, it’s a kind of shelf, right underneath,” said Tabitha.