The Patron Saint of Liars (5 page)

When I wrote down the address of Saint Elizabeth's, my hand was shaking. I asked if he would write a letter, telling them I was coming. "Don't tell them about Thomas," I said. I thought the fact that I was married might disqualify me from a home for unwed mothers.

I stood for a long time at the door, looking around the altar to the church where I had spent so much of my life. Mrs. Marnez was there lighting candles, as I had done year after year, asking God to show her His will. Old Henry at the front railing on his knees. A few people I didn't know.

"What about your mother?" he said.

"Don't tell her either."

"Are you going to let her think you're dead?" he said. His voice was a whisper but it carried, as the voice of a good priest carries.

"Don't ask me this."

"You've asked enough of me today, now I'm asking you, Rose. What will you do about your mother?"

I turned around to face him, but I shouldn't have. I understood then why confessionals were dark places where you told your secrets through screens. "I'll give her up," I said, and went out to the car. The second I said it I knew that would be my penance, the worst thing I could bear. I was doing a terrible thing, but I would pay the price. If I gave up the thing I loved most in the world, then maybe God would respect my desperation.

Elizabeth was not the saint I would have chosen to name a home for unwed mothers after. She had wanted a child, prayed for one for so many years, and when John came to her late in life she was filled with joy. But then again she was a woman who found herself pregnant when she did not think that such a thing was possible. Maybe that was the part they wanted us to remember. I have always taken names very seriously, people or places. It's because my mother took them seriously. It was my father who wanted to name me Rose. My mother told a story of being pregnant with me. "Big as a ship," she liked to say. She would lie on a chaise longue in the little garden outside their apartment, her swollen feet sunk into a sea of pillows, and argue with my father over names. "He was sure I was giving birth to a flower," she would say. "Lily, Iris, Daisy, those were the kinds of names he was interested in." My mother believed that a name should come from the Bible or at least a saint. She settled on Martha, despite what Jesus had said. She understood how Martha felt, wishing her sister would give her a little help in the kitchen. Anyone would rather sit and listen, but there are some things, like dinner, that needed to be attended to. So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that. My mother had a sudden change of heart then. She saw my father's need for a name that bore no more significance than the bush that grew alongside the house. A name that was as important as beauty itself. Elizabeth lost her child, too, in the end. That was another thing.

But I didn't think about any of this for a long time, until I was nearly across the California state line. Until then I was crying for my own mother with such a fierceness that I twice had to pull the car over to the side of the road because I couldn't see.

August was a lethal time to attempt such a drive, but there was no waiting. A seasoned liar, like the one I became, is in no hurry. But the one I started out as that day in the doctor's office, my knees pressed together tightly, had hands that shook. I looked over my shoulder, cried easily. All of that is gone now.

The backseat was lined with water bottles and they made a gentle sloshing sound that was almost like an ocean. It was all I could think of to bring. My life, the car's life, were completely intertwined, and water, I thought, would save us both. The sun made waving lines of heat across the black highway. The land was so desolate, so untraveled, that I couldn't imagine why they had built a highway there at all. It was not so much a place as much as a place to get through, a stretch you had to cross if you were ever going to get to where you were going.

It turned out I had a little money saved. I had started putting some aside when I was taking so many trips. I thought, what if something ever happened when I was on the road, something could break down. I kept a bank envelope under the tarp that covered the spare tire and whenever I had a job I'd put in ten or twenty. I didn't take a dime from Thomas when I left, but I took his car. That car had become my best friend. I could leave my husband but not his car. By the time I pulled into a gas station in Barstow I had spent the little bit I had in my purse, and so I took out the envelope. There was more than six hundred dollars in there, and I kept thinking, I must have known, all the time I was slipping in money, never looking to see how much I had, part of me was planning to leave.

But worrying about the car made me careful, and most nights I just pulled over to a rest stop and put the water bottles on the floor and slept in the backseat. If something happened to the car I'd be wiped out, stuck in some desert town with no way to go on. In Barstow I asked a station attendant with the name Dwight stitched on his shirt in red cursive letters to look under the hood for me.

"I'm going a long way by myself," I told him. I leaned under with him, trying to get a little of the shade. It was sickeningly hot, 105, maybe more. "I just wish you'd check to see if everything's all right. I don't want to get out in the middle of nowhere by myself and have something happen," I said.

Dwight slipped his finger down into one of the belts, gave it a little tug. "Woman shouldn't be traveling alone," he said.

I knew it could go either way. He could help me out or drop an aspirin into the battery which would send me limping back to him as soon as I was five miles out of town. "I could use your help," I said. "I'm going to have a baby." It was the first time I'd just said it out like that. It was the first time it occurred to me that it could be something to use. "I'm headed just past Las Cruces. My husband, he's stationed out at Fort Bliss. He didn't want me to come alone, but he couldn't get leave to get me."

He looked at me under the hood. My dress was loose and blew around, there would be no telling for sure. "You're in good shape," he said, touching the spark plugs. "I'll fill up the radiator, but you keep an eye on that. Pull over every hundred miles or so and check it. The water, it's got to be up to here. But don't touch anything. If it overheats, you just stand back and wait." I thanked him. I meant it. When I got back into the car he came back and leaned in my window. "People will tell you your transmission's going to go. But don't listen to them. Your transmission is good."

There were so many things I needed to know, how to fix a car, how to lie. My mother taught me how to put on eyeliner without smudging it, but life was going to take more than that.

This driving was not a game. My back ached down into my hips and I tried moving to one side and then another. Only the week before I had thought I wanted nothing more in the world than to drive in one endless direction. Highway 40 was exactly that. East was an endless direction. The radio came in and out in waves. I ran out of songs I knew the words to and then sang them all over again. I played games with myself. At the next town I'll stop. I'll take off a whole day, get a motel room, sleep. But the next town would come and I'd say, You've made it this far, you might as well keep going, one more hour won't make a difference and that will be an hour you won't have to drive tomorrow. When I did stop, it was to get gas, check the oil, fill the radiator. I would walk around the car a couple of times, lift my hands up over my head, stare at the landscape that looked the way it had on the stop before and the stop before that. I did not know how to keep going and I did not know how to stop, so I kept going.

I had started to doubt my body. When I got so tired that the cars in front of me began to sway on the road, I remembered my mother saying how tired she had been when she was pregnant, and I would think, so you're not really tired. When I felt sick at my stomach, I wondered if I was actually sick, or if that was just part of it, too. Anything I could attribute to this baby I could dismiss, because I'd decided somewhere along the road that I was going to have nothing to do with it. I was following through on my part of it. I would see this pregnancy out, but that was it, no sickness, no side effects. It was enough that I was going so far to have it, and that I would see it delivered into the hands of those decent parents whose complete and wholesome lives I liked to contemplate. There was a difference, I knew, between being pregnant and being a mother. I was pregnant.

The steering wheel was so hot I couldn't move my hands around. That was one of the worst parts about stopping, making a cool place for your hands again. I tried writing letters to my mother in my head, but they weren't any better than the note I'd left for Thomas. I wanted to do better for her. I knew she'd been a good wife to my father, that she was a good wife to Joe, even if she could never love him in the same way. She took marriage seriously, as she had taken motherhood seriously. She would find a way to love me even if I told her the truth, but I could feel her disappointment like a hot wind on my neck. The truth was something that would have to be mine alone. It was something that receded as I drove east.

There was a time in my life when I'd wanted to know everything. I wanted to read the brutal details of every local murder. I wanted to know exactly how my father had died, the extent of damage to the car, the very place it happened. Facts had a certain irresistible quality. No matter how deeply they disturbed me, I thought I was better off knowing. But learning is easier than forgetting. The fact that my mother, that Thomas, didn't know where I had gone or the reason, made my life easier, but I liked to think it made things easier for them as well. The world is full of things we're better off not knowing.

But that didn't mean I couldn't lie to her. Late one night, after eating eggs and toast in a truck stop in New Mexico, I got all the quarters the cashier would give me and called her up. The phone was in the parking lot, and when I shut the door to the booth it gave off a blue fluorescent light. I put the change in a napkin and fed it steadily into the phone. When Joe answered I was so surprised that for a minute I couldn't think of what to say.

"It's Rose," I told him.

"Rose? Rose?" He didn't speak to me but dropped the phone on the bed and called out for my mother. Both of us were crying when she picked up, and it made it harder to understand what was being said.

"Come home," my mother said.

"I can't."

"You will," she said. "I love you. I'm not going to have you lost out in the world. You're my daughter."

I put a hand over my other ear, trying to block out the sounds of the traffic. "Things just weren't right," I said. "My life, it wasn't right. I can't tell you about it now, you're just going to have to trust me. I'm doing what's best." It was almost exactly what I had written on the postcards I hadn't mailed. It sounded every bit as wrong when I said it.

"Whatever this is, we'll fix it. Thomas is going crazy. He's terrible, Rose. You can leave if you have to but not like this."

I looked out at the traffic going along the highway. "I'm already gone," I said.

I stayed in the booth for a while after I hung up. Then I opened the door, which automatically snapped off the light. I had promised myself I would stay in that town for the night. But I didn't.

There was nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me. The world consisted of as much road as I could see in either direction. I found myself looking forward to towns, counting down the miles to Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Amarillo. When I got close to a city I felt almost euphoric, as if I had finally arrived, but five minutes later I would be on the other side, looking at the mileage for whatever was ahead. I was disappointed in myself because it used to be I'd never care at all. But now I was tired in my bones. It was important for me to have something to concentrate on, because when my mind wandered it went to my mother, or worse yet, Thomas. I would picture him sitting in our house, the lights off, trying to watch television. I could see him going through my dresses in the closet, running his hands along the sleeves. The worst was to think of him eating. The thought of him at the table alone, trying to finish dinner, was nearly enough to make me turn the car around. Once I did, just before Oklahoma. I drove back twenty-five miles, and then turned around again just as quickly, because nothing looked any different. To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you'd never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.

Just over the Oklahoma border, thirty-five miles outside Elk City, I picked up a hitchhiker. I told myself I wouldn't do it. It went against everything I believed about driving as something best done alone. But the sight of Oklahoma scared me to death. I pulled into a rest stop to refill my water bottles from a public spigot and spread the map across the hood. Arkansas was as far away as China.

"Where you headed?" a man said to me. He looked young, maybe nineteen or twenty. He was wearing jeans and a white tee shirt. His hair couldn't have been more than a quarter of an inch long in any one place. He didn't look like the kind of person who'd kill you. He looked like he knew how to drive.

"East," I said, my hand trying to block out enough of the sun so I could see him.

"East isn't a place," he said.

"Well, I'm going east."

"You taking Forty into Arkansas?"

I looked around. There were no other cars in the parking lot save one station wagon loaded up with kids. Someone must have left him there. I nodded.

"I could use a ride," he said, "if that's the way you're going. I'd kick in for gas."

Any other time in my life I would have said no, but I didn't see that there was anything left to lose that I hadn't already lost. "Sure," I said. "Come on."

He looked so pleased, and when he smiled, seemed even younger, sixteen maybe. "You know how to drive?" I asked him.