Blood Orange (17 page)

“It’s me, Dorothy.” She pulled up a straight-backed chair and
sat. “Lexy Neuhaus.”

“I know who you are. I recognize your voice. Where’ve you
been?”

“Evening Prayer.”

She had been the only person at the short service. At the end of
the day people wanted to be home with their families or off with
friends. Solitude did not bother Lexy. She loved St. Tom’s. From
within its shadows and musty twilight she imagined she heard the
murmur of old prayers and petitions. As she read aloud the names
of the sick and dying, the travelers, the troubled and the weary, she
tried to envision each person. That evening her favorite prayer of intercession had been chosen with Micah, Dana, David, and Bailey in
mind.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep
this night, and give Thine angels charge of those who sleep. Tend the
sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the
suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for Thy love’s
sake.

She improvised a prayer for herself, asking God to help her overcome her anger, deal with loneliness, and take greater joy in her
work. The priesthood was an isolating job. She had known that
from the start.

“What are you thinking about?” Dorothy snapped.

“A family at St. Tom’s, the Cabots. Their daughter was kidnapped.”

“I don’t pay you … to think about whoever they are.”

“My dear, you don’t pay me at all.”

“You’re … only here so I’ll give money to the church.”

“Wrong again, Dorothy. There are a few things money can’t buy,
and I’m one of them.”

Women from the church came by every day and sat with
Dorothy, but volunteers for the job were few because Dorothy was
not a likable woman and probably never had been. At coffee hour a
few Sundays back, Lexy had overheard someone say that it was well
beyond time Dorothy Wilkerson died. The endowment needed her
money, and one hundred and two was more years than anyone deserved. Lexy had flinched at the words. Sometimes the truth was
too ugly to speak.

A tear made its slow way from Dorothy’s eye down her crevassed
face. Lexy pulled a tissue from the box on the bedside table and
touched it to her cheek.

Dorothy winced and jerked her head aside. “Don’t … put paper
on my face.” She lifted her hand a few inches off the blanket and
wiggled her fingers. “In the dresser. Handkerchief.”

In a cream-colored, quilted satin box lay four piles of ironed
handkerchiefs of fine cotton and linen, lace-edged and embroidered.

“Oh my,” Lexy said, “these are beautiful. I’ve never seen hankies
like this. It seems a shame-“

Her phone vibrated against her hip.

“Nonsense,” Dorothy croaked. “Bring me the … red poppies.”

When Lexy laid the handkerchief on Dorothy’s upturned palm,
the old woman’s fingertips skimmed the raised red embroidery as if
reading Braille.

Lexy said, “I couldn’t blow my nose on that. It’s much too beautiful.”

The vibrations stopped.

“When I was a girl we always had … like this. Now everything’s
paper … plastic.” She lifted the handkerchief to her face, holding it
a few inches from her eyes.

Lexy used the moment to glance at the printout on her phone.
The call had been from Micah. Much as she wanted to talk to him,
she could not leave Dorothy now.

“I sat … on Mother’s bed and played with these. She had more
… more beautiful.” She lifted the red-poppy-embroidered handkerchief an inch.

“Do you want your medication, Dorothy?” When there was no
response, Lexy asked, “Do you want to tell me why you’re crying?”

A single light on the table beside the bed cast an ashy golden
glow across Dorothy’s face. Lexy rested her hand on the pillow. She
rarely urged medication on a dying person, believing that at the end
of life pain was sometimes less important than the need to communicate with a clear mind.

Why had Micah called?

“Doctor Neuhaus …

“I’m not a doctor, Dorothy. Call me Lexy.”

“Reverend Neuhaus … “

Even when she was healthy Dorothy had not known what to call
her female priest.

“I’m listening, Dorothy.”

“Something …” Lexy saw her fingers twitch in agitation. Lexy
held them gently. “I … Before I was married there was … a man…”

There was so often a man.

Lexy shut her eyes and focused Dorothy’s image in her mind as she imagined that a narrow band of light connected the two of
them. She felt the light pour into her palms and heat them.

“I’m here, Dorothy. I’m listening.”

“I had … abortion. Mama took me … Kansas City, and then I
married Forrest … never told him.”

Most of the sins men and women carried with them all their lives
were in the end so mundane; and yet, as the liturgy said, the burden
of them was intolerable. Lexy felt a heavy sorrow pressing against
her heart and lungs like a shadow-being filling her up inside. Dorothy
probably thought she was the only person at St. Tom’s with a dark
story to tell, but Lexy knew everyone’s secrets, and there were far
worse tales. George Willits killed a child in Vietnam, and no amount
of absolution could banish her face from his dreams. Another man
made love to his sister until they went away to separate colleges, and
he still yearned for her though he was married and a father several
times over. A woman put a pillow over her suffering husband’s face
and held it there until he died. She felt guilty for not feeling guilty,
for being glad she’d done it. Lexy had heard these stories whispered
in her office, in the church; a confession of murder had come in a
letter. Each case had deepened her understanding of what it meant
to be a child of God. Dorothy’s body was, ultimately, as disposable
as one of the paper tissues she so despised. Despite age and illness,
and no matter what tawdry things occurred in the course of a lifetime, the child of God remained unsullied.

In each of the unattractive, the grumpy, irrational, and difficult
men and women she dealt with every day, Lexy tried to see that
child of God within. This was central to all she believed; it was
what enabled her to love and forgive the imperfect individuals
around her. But love and forgiveness required a particular kind
of emotional energy, supplies of which often ran low in her. She had learned to playact at such times and disliked herself for
doing so.

Lexy settled Dorothy’s hands on the coverlet. “None of it matters now.”

“A boy … I believe … was … a boy.”

“You don’t have to be afraid or ashamed or worried. Your husband isn’t angry with you, and God loves you just the same as the
day you were born, just as much.”

Lexy opened her prayer book to the Office of Reconciliation and
read the reassuring old words. “Now there is rejoicing in Heaven,
Dorothy; for you were lost, and are found; you were dead, and are
now alive in Christ Jesus our Lord. Abide in peace. The Lord has
put away all your sins.”

After that Dorothy seemed to sleep awhile. In the dark room
smelling of roses and medicine and old age, Lexy closed her eyes.
She doubted she had said and done enough to ease Dorothy’s guilt
and agitation. At this most mysterious and important time in her
one hundred and two years, Dorothy deserved a priest who was
wiser than Lexy, more loving, more deeply and profoundly faithful.
The needs of people were so many and so great, and by comparison,
her gifts were so puny and unreliable. What the world needed was
saints, men and women with unshakeable convictions and a genius
for giving of themselves. And what did the poor world get? Lexy
Neuhaus and her coat of many flaws.

She wondered if she should leave now and call her brother.

Dorothy jerked awake suddenly, her faded blue eyes wide with
alarm. “They were … here again.”

Lexy remembered the nighttime visitors.

“Three of them.” Dorothy looked at her right hand and raised
three shaky fingers. “They have hats … big. With feathers.”

Great. The Three Musketeers.

“They say … call … Ellen.”

“Who is Ellen?”

Dorothy turned her head aside and muttered something.

“I didn’t hear you, Dorothy.”

“Daughter.”

“Dorothy, you’ve told me so many times, you and your husband
were-

“I … lied.”

Of course, Lexy thought and almost laughed. Everyone lies.
About everything. Still, it was a surprise to hear Dorothy say it. She
belonged to what Lexy thought of as a more honest generation. But
that idea must be a myth, another lie. Perhaps everyone had always
lied, when and as it pleased them.

“Where is she?”

“Del Mar.” A beach suburb a few miles north.

“How long is it since you saw her?”

“I have … phone number.”

On the pillow Dorothy’s old head was small and fragile as a newborn’s, but gray-skinned, the eye sockets deep and shadowy as those
of a Halloween mask. It was as if her body, unable to die, had decided to implode. One day Lexy would come into this room and
find Dorothy had vanished into herself.

“In … drawer there.” Her cracked voice still managed to sound
imperious. “Yellow sticky thing.”

Among the pencils and bookmarks and bottles of aspirin and
tubes of dried-up ointment, Lexy found a square of yellow paper
with a name-Ellen Brownlee-and an 858 number written in a
shaky hand.

“Tell her I’m … dying….” A profound sigh rattled up from
Dorothy’s throat, and she began to weep.

“I’ll talk to her,” Lexy said. “I’ll do it tonight.”

As Lexy got up to leave, Dorothy became agitated. She shook
her head rapidly from side to side, her mouth twisting into a grimace, and said something too softly for Lexy to hear, so Lexy
moved closer to the bed and leaned in.

“I won’t know what to do,” Dorothy said, gasping. “Who will …
help me? I want to do … right thing.”

She was talking about death. And having performance anxiety.
Suddenly Lexy felt swollen with love for Dorothy Wilkerson.

“You won’t be alone,” she said. “Christ will be there. He’ll show
you the way, Dorothy. You can hold out your hand and He’ll take
it.

“You … stay.”

Lexy would have to miss the ten P.M. Pacific Beach AA meeting.
She had been looking forward to it, needing it, but Dorothy was
more important.

“Reverend?”

“Yes, Dorothy.”

,,will it … hurt?”

Lexy blinked the tears from her eyes and put her lips near
Dorothy’s ear. Before speaking she took a moment to inhale the
scent of old skin under the sweet fragrance of rose-scented powder,
the smells of age and death and dying. It was important not to flinch
from them.

“It will be a sweet thing, Dorothy.” Lexy thought of Bailey
Cabot sitting on the steps and Dana seeing her as she turned the
corner. “It will be like returning home. At last.”

When Lexy returned to her office she sat in her desk chair with
her long legs on the windowsill. She had a bad feeling about calling
Dorothy’s daughter. Instead she called Micah, letting the phone ring twenty times before she disconnected. She sensed that he was in his
apartment. Listening to the ring, knowing it was she, not answering.

She had too much on her mind to have to nursemaid her
brother. He made her cross.

She had promised Dorothy she would call her daughter Ellen
that night. This also made her cross; she wished she were in
Bermuda at a five-star hotel.

On a particularly dark day the previous winter, Lexy had an attack of martyrdom and misspent the better part of a drizzly Sunday
afternoon tallying up how many hours she worked each week, multiplied by fifty-two and divided into her salary. The result was an
hourly wage pitifully low enough to gratify her sense that day of
being overworked and underappreciated. The mood didn’t last
long. No one became a priest to make money, and she was hardly
suffering.

She lived rent-free a block from the ocean in a condominium
owned by the church. Her insurance premiums and retirement were
paid; and she drove an almost new Japanese import, compliments of
a parishioner who owned a car dealership.

And then there were all the immaterial things she could never
reckon in terms of dollars and cents. Hers was often exciting work,
rich in surprises and challenges, with very little that was routine.
She spoke to people at their most needy and vulnerable-like the
stranger who wandered in one day needing to talk about his son
who had died in Iraq. Afterward she saw that she had helped him
by listening without judgment. It was the promise of such unexpected encounters with the Holy Spirit that got her out of bed and
onto her knees every morning; it was the lift of her heart when she
held a baby over the baptismal font and claimed it as Christ’s own
forever.

And then there were the things she never wanted to do. Like call
Ellen Brownlee.

She fished in her purse for the yellow paper and stared at the
number written there. She put her hand on the telephone, then
withdrew it, looked at her scarlet nails, at the dark, empty street. In
a few weeks it would be Halloween, which meant a return to
Standard Time. The world would seem colder as it turned toward
the Advent season.

She heard her mother’s voice in her head, the atonal western
voice parched of emotion, the voice of empty spaces and immense
skies, telling her to get on with her work and stop dilly-dallying. She
wondered if her mother ever talked to anyone about her two
youngest children, the odd ones who had left Wyoming and carved
out lives so different from those she had chosen for them. Lexy
imagined her telling people about her three strong Montana sons
with handsome families and steady jobs. She probably never mentioned her other son, an artist, a peculiar, moody boy, and her
daughter, who was-of all things-a priest.

Lexy called the number on the yellow paper.

Ellen Brownlee’s voice was clipped, without lilt or laughter.

“I’m Lexy Neuhaus, the priest at your mother’s church, Ellen.”