Ghost Country (31 page)

Patsy Wanachs had seen Mara on the news, and had a call from Dr. Stonds besides: if Mara shows up there as she might—with her penchant for self-dramatization now picturing herself among society’s outcasts—let me know. When Mara showed up, though, Patsy didn’t recognize her. She was looking for that bush of wild hair, not a baldheaded girl with a broken front tooth.

When she ran from Hector, Mara managed only a block and a half at a dead run before she had to stop for breath. A week’s malnutrition and sleep deprivation had weakened muscles which used to move her easily around basketball or tennis courts. Her bag banging into her side further slowed her down. She lurked under the loading dock of a building that backed onto the Pleiades for five minutes, but neither the doctor nor police seemed to be behind her, so she emerged and headed in the vague direction of Hagar’s House.

If she got there early and got another night’s sleep, maybe in the morning she’d be able to figure out what to do. Dr. Tammuz claimed Grandfather wasn’t talking about the locked ward, but she didn’t believe him. Grandfather probably told the resident to lie to her, to lure her into the hospital, and then he’d put her in restraints. That meant she needed to disguise herself, even out on the street, let alone at Hagar’s House. She took the stocking out of her plastic bag and pulled it down over her ears, then frowned at her image in
a store window. If Patsy Wanachs took it into her head to inspect the women closely, she might easily yank the stocking from Mara’s head and tell her to stop playing games. And then, swollen with righteousness, call Grandfather.

Mara wandered on down Grand Avenue, kicking at loose pieces of pavement. Near the corner of Wells she passed a dingy barbershop. Maybe it was her throbbing tooth clouding her mind that made her think shaving her head would be a good idea. Anyway, the old black man who was alone in the shop didn’t blink at her request. True, he demanded to be paid up front. Seven-fifty. About what Harriet tipped the man who styled her hair every Thursday morning.

When she saw herself in the mirror behind the chair Mara was shocked. She looked like a boy, and her head felt cold and unprotected, despite the muggy air.

Patsy Wanachs, glancing cursorily at Mara’s face when she checked in, didn’t recognize her, but Cynthia Lowrie did. Cynthia was handing out Bibles for Rafe in the activities room when Mara sidled in. Cynthia dropped the Bibles, her hand over her mouth, until Rafe asked if she’d lost the few wits she’d been born with, and to get busy, Caroline and a woman named Ashley drew the metal folding chairs into a large semicircle—they got an extra clothes ration for helping out—while Cynthia went back to distributing Bibles. Cynthia tried shepherding the group into chairs, but they were still agitated about Madeleine and the hotel, and only sat down when Rafe, looking up from a low-voiced consultation with Patsy Wanachs, barked out an order to them. They were used to responding to his authority, and they did so again, although many of them muttered angrily as they broke up their conversations.

Cynthia took a chair next to Mara. She was afraid to speak to her, in case Rafe noticed, but she kept staring at her friend’s bald head. When she’d seen Mara on the six o’clock news, her hair was as shaggy as ever.

“We’ll start with a prayer. Cynthia, will you stop mooning
about and join us in asking for Jesus’ guidance in understanding life and its problems? … Lord, open our hearts to understanding Your will, and to receiving instruction from Your Holy Word. We may not always understand the guidance You are giving us, but we know You are acting out of perfect goodness, as a father looks after his children with perfect love.”

Here Mara stepped on Cynthia’s foot, but Cynthia refused to respond, except with a nervous glance at Rafe.

“We know that some of our sisters are distressed about the death of one of their company. Sister Natalie was sadly afflicted in mind, and it was Your will to keep her mind clouded, but—”

“Madeleine,” Mara said, her anger starting to rise again. “Her name was Madeleine. And it’s never God’s will for someone to be as unhappy as she was.”

Cynthia clutched Mara’s hand: don’t make him mad, the pressure in her fingers begged, he only takes it out on me.

“If you have a contribution to make, wait until I’m through with the prayer, young woman. I presume someone on the staff checked that you
are
a woman?”

“I’m a woman, all right,” Mara said, feeling an enormous shield of anonymity protecting her from Rafe, “but did they check into your species? Are you really a member of the human race? If we stripped you, would we find a space alien? You were praying for a woman who died in a horrible way, and you got her name wrong. It’s Madeleine, not Natalie, and if it was God’s will that she was homeless and heard voices, then He’s a piss-poor god.”

“How dare you?” Rafe was on his feet, his husky voice raw with rage. “The rules of this session are stated clearly up front: you cannot disrupt the prayer meeting. If you say one more thing without being invited to speak I will have you thrown out of the shelter.”

Jacqui moved over next to Mara. “Don’t carry on so, girl: Maddy’s at peace now, and she wouldn’t want you giving up your bed just because Brother Rafe got her name wrong. Wherever she is, she’s proud of you for standing up for her, so let it go, okay?”

Rafe breathed heavily for a few seconds, but when it was clear Mara had submitted to his will he sat back down and resumed his prayer. The day’s study passage came from First Kings, where the prophet Elijah raised the widow’s son from the dead, but then fled in terror from the threats of Jezebel. Rafe said, of course only Jesus could raise souls from the dead, so it was the power of Jesus working through Elijah that healed the widow’s son; Elijah’s mere mortal state was proven by his fear of Jezebel, the harlot, who made him flee Judea for a cave in the mountains.

“So how come there are no prophets around these days like Elijah to raise you from the dead?” LaBelle asked, thinking of Madeleine, thinking of her own father who had died when she was two, leaving her with her mother and her uncles: if Jesus could bring the dead to life, how come He let her father lie there dead, knowing what lay ahead for her?

“We will all be raised at the last day, if we have faith,” Rafe answered. “And revelation ended with the Resurrection: we don’t need new prophets—we need to follow the Word as incarnated in Jesus.”

“We’ll get pie in the sky when we die, is that it?” Mara demanded.

“Young woman, you may think you are being funny, but blasphemy is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the one sin that cannot be forgiven.”

“But what if Maddy was a prophet?” LaBelle persisted. “What if she was a prophet from the Mother of God? Women never got any prophets like that, so maybe the Mother of God is speaking to us now, like Maddy thought, through that crack in the wall. You know, like women talk in real life, through cracks.”

“Let it go, LaBelle,” Jacqui said gruffly. “Like Brother Rafe said, she’s at peace now. Let her lie in peace.”

“And don’t bring talk about prophets of the Mother of God into church,” Rafe said. “That comes perilously close to witchcraft. As does talk about blood coming out of a wall. It’s been on the news the last two days—there was a rusty pipe down there, and
Natalie was an unstable woman who couldn’t tell the difference between rust and blood.”

“Her name was Madeleine. Don’t you ever listen to anything a woman tells you?” Mara snapped.

“And did you go down there and look at that crack yourself?” LaBelle said. “You think because you have a lot of money God talks to you but not to us? That’s not what it says in Scripture, in Scripture it says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.”

“You think we care about what you have to say?” Nicole added. “You know as well as me we only sit through these sessions because otherwise we can’t get a bed on Wednesday nights.”

“What does he know about Scripture that we can’t find out on our own?” Caroline put in.

“Oh, why are we bothering with Madeleine?” the woman Ashley, who had helped set up the chairs, exclaimed. “No one wants to admit the truth—she was crazy. Let’s finish the Bible lesson so we can get to bed.”

The room erupted into argument, as Nanette leapt from her seat to argue with Ashley. Maddy was murdered, she said, by that hotel.

LaBelle and Caroline continued their fight about whether Maddy’s wall might contain miracles, while others thought the point of the furor was a vote on whether they even wanted Bible study. Ashley repeated that she just wanted to go on with the text so they could get to bed. Two women actually were asleep, so worn by their day’s trudging from drop-in point to drop-in point that not even the fight in the room could rouse them.

Rafe Lowrie was furious with them. He was on his feet again, yelling at top volume, but the voice that controlled the cattle pit had no effect on the women. Most of them were on their feet as well, all the insults of life on the streets—the rapes they’d experienced, the beatings and robberies, the daily humiliations, the sore feet, the unwashed clothes—finding expression in their furor over Madeleine’s death.

Cynthia was so white that a pimple on her forehead glowed red. Mara, glancing at her, knew that as soon as he was alone with her Rafe would vent his furies on her. Suddenly, without thinking of anything except that she ought to do something to protect Cynthia, she climbed up on her wobbly metal chair. One or two people looked at her, but the rest kept up their arguments.

Patsy Wanachs, drawn by the furor, ran into the room. She took a police whistle from around her neck and blew into it, a long shrill blast that momentarily lulled the noise.

Into that relative silence Mara called, “The wall does perform miracles. On Tuesday night Madeleine cursed the garage manager, I heard her curse him with a plague of boils. This afternoon they took him to the hospital. One of the parking attendants told me: he broke out all over his body, he couldn’t even breathe, they were in his lungs.”

“It works.” LaBelle’s eyes were shining. “Praise Jesus! Praise Mary! I’m going down there. Maybe She’ll heal me or cure my bad knees. Nicole—you got female problems. Let’s see what She can maybe do.”

Mara grabbed Cynthia’s hand and dragged her into the buzzing heart of the swarm.

He woke with the words on his lips. He was in his own bed, again at three in the morning, weeping with despair at the loss of the dream. He had been with her, in her, how could he be only here alone in bed?

He couldn’t remember leaving the hotel and returning to his apartment. He had stayed at the Pleiades garage long after Mara
Stonds ran from him, long after the first miracle seeker appeared, drawn as Harriet feared by the television report.

Hector couldn’t bring himself to move from the curb. As the evening deepened into night, other miracle seekers drifted by to inspect the wall. The woman protected by Mary’s blue aura stayed most of the evening, directing newcomers to the crack that Nicolo, the garage man, had shown her, then pointing out Hector. He was her doctor, he knows more than he’s telling.