Lay It on My Heart (29 page)

“. . . seven, six, five . . .” says Pastor Chick.

“‘Give to Caesar' bicentennial quarter,” says Kelly-Lynn, rolling her eyes again. “‘The street of the city was gold' button. Now we're going to take somebody's button.”

“We can get one from Doctor Osborne,” says Seth. “He keeps a box for costumes.”

“. . . two, one!” Pastor Chick calls out, and we trail after the rest of the kids thronging out of the parking lot in their groups of four.

The crowd teems down the middle of Main Street in one direction, all getting in each other's way. Like lemmings, Phoebe would say. I lead our group the other way, up Main toward the single blinking light. Beyond the light are the tree streets, and beyond them the water tower. There aren't as many houses on this side of town, only twenty or so, including Dr. Osborne's, but if we can complete the list in this general area, we'll finish ahead of everyone.

The first place we try belongs to Mrs. Renfrew, a friend of Daze's. She comes to the door in a housedress and with her hair in curlers. “How's your grandmother, dear?” she asks me. “Don't shatter this lightbulb and cut your sweet little hands.” From her purse, she gives us each a piece of stale gum, and we all work our jaws with it until she closes the door. Then I spit mine into the storm drain, and so does everyone else.

“This is lame,” Kelly-Lynn says, crossing “light of the world” lightbulb from the list.

“We forgot to ask if she wants it back,” says Tracy.

“You should always return people's property anyway,” says Seth. To me.

A bald man I've seen around town answers the next door. “Who is it?” his wife calls from somewhere behind him, and he says, “I don't know. No, wait. It's the Peake girl. Do I have that right? How's your father?”

Everyone looks at me.

“Fine,” I say, training my eyes on the man's waxy-looking head.

“You must be looking forward to him coming home.”

I want to tell him it's none of his business, but then he probably wouldn't want to give us an “ark of gopher wood” wooden spoon. “Yes,” I say. “Do you have a wooden spoon?”

“You kids coming from the church tonight?” says his wife, popping her head over the man's shoulder. “Oh, hi there. Charmaine Peake, right? How's your father? How's your grandmother? And Seth Catterson? I don't know you other two girls. We read about this in the bulletin. What fun!”

“We're after a wooden spoon,” says Tracy, moving things along.

The woman draws her mouth in regretfully. “I have one, but it never leaves my kitchen. It was my great-grandmother's, if you can believe it.”

“Then how about anything else on this list,” Kelly-Lynn says and thrusts out the paper.

The man looks it over. “‘Give to Caesar,' ha. A bicentennial quarter?” He jingles some change in his pocket and pulls out a handful, slowly turning over each quarter while we wait. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Tell you what,” says the man. “I'll go through my change drawer and look for one of those quarters, and you kids stop by again.”

We head back down their walk. A gentle, chilly wind rustles the few leaves underfoot. It's still light out, but not for long. Lamps start to come on in the windows as we pass. More porch lights too. It's supposed to be a full moon, but you can't see it for the low clouds.

“How come you said you're looking forward to your dad coming home, when he's not?” Seth says.

“Why don't you worry about your own dad coming home?” I say. It comes from the meanness that I'm figuring out might always be inside me, ready to go.

“That's different,” says Seth. “He's fundraising. He's just on the road. He's not moving in somewhere else.”

“On the road,” says Kelly-Lynn as we proceed down the street. “That's code for getting a divorce.”

Seth stops in the middle of the sidewalk. “My parents are missionaries. They are not getting divorced.”

“Charmaine's parents aren't, either,” Tracy says.

“I never said they were,” says Seth. “What I said was her father's not coming home. He has to stay locked up.”

“He's not locked up,” I say, feeling the depressing way meanness only makes more of itself.
Beget
is the word, like in the Bible. Meanness begets meanness.

“He's not exactly free to go,” Seth says. “He's crazy.”

“Some might say it's crazy to keep pictures of dead people,” Kelly-Lynn says. If I said it, it would sound like another mean thing, but she makes it sound natural, almost friendly.

“It's not crazy,” Seth says. “It's just a way not to think about stuff.”

“I saw
Faces of Death
at my dad's girlfriend's house,” Tracy says.

“Did it help you not think about stuff?” Kelly-Lynn says.

“I never even tried not to think about anything,” says Tracy. “Why would I?”

“Seth's talking about lust,” I say. “He lusts after girls, which is a sin. So then he looks at sickening pictures to make him stop thinking about the things he wants to do to girls.”

“I don't want to do anything,” Seth says, his voice hitting a shrill note. Even in the fading light I can see his neck turning red again.

“What if it backfires and you start wanting to do stuff more?” Kelly-Lynn asks. “Like to that woman on the table.”

“What table?” says Tracy. “What woman?”

We are now standing on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Osborne's house. He lives in the only Sears-catalog bungalow in town, Phoebe has told me, which his father built from a kit. We don't even see him sitting there on the swing, behind the post, until he emerges from the shadow to stand at the top of the porch steps.

“Doctor Osborne, tell them,” Seth says. “About looking at pictures to control your thoughts.”

Dr. Osborne fingers the cross of nails hanging against his chest. “Ah,” he says. “Scavenger hunt, unless I miss my guess. Charmaine Peake, how's your mother?”

“All people do in this town is ask after your family,” says Tracy.

“She took the pictures,” Seth says, indicating me with a flick of his head that makes his glasses glint in the porch light.

Dr. Osborne turns an ear to us like he didn't quite hear. Interested. Polite. “Pictures?” he repeats. “Who took pictures?”

“Stole them,” Seth says.

“Tell me about these pictures,” says Dr. Osborne. He looks from Seth to me, then back to Seth.

“What do you mean, tell you about them?” Seth says. “The pictures.” His voice is tight and high, shrill again. There's no question for me now where he got the photographs, no matter how much Dr. Osborne pretends.

“Don't have a conniption,” says Tracy.

“They sound important,” says Dr. Osborne. “Have all of you seen these pictures?”

“I have,” says Kelly-Lynn.

“Maybe I'd better have a look myself,” says Dr. Osborne. “Charmaine, you have them, if I've followed the ins and outs here, yes?”

Seth's bottom lip pulls away from his top lip, but no sound comes out. He looks at Dr. Osborne in outrage and something like despair, and I try, from meanness, to take pleasure in it.

“I might,” I say, “and I might not.”

Dr. Osborne squints at me, but only with one eye. “I don't understand.”

“What kind of pictures would you use to stop thinking about something?” I ask him. “Say you wanted to keep on being the man who has never known a woman. Say you wanted to stop thinking about my mother.”

“I'm not sure what you're getting at, Charmaine.”

“Would you look at a picture of a dead woman?” says Kelly-Lynn.

“Yes,” Seth says. “And other dead people. You know,” he says. “Tell them.” It's as if he still thinks Dr. Osborne might not understand, as if he can't imagine any other reason for what the man's saying. Or not saying.

Dr. Osborne looks away from Seth and smiles at Tracy and Kelly-Lynn in a frozen way. “I don't believe I caught either of your names,” he says. “All right, kids, whatever you're up to tonight, I don't believe I have anything you need. Seth, this is a bit of a disappointment. Charmaine, don't you think your mother has enough on her plate these days without having to worry about you? How about you all head along now, so I won't feel like I have to call your parents.”

“And say what?” I ask.

“You don't even know my parents,” says Kelly-Lynn. “You don't even know my name.”

“We don't even have a phone,” says Tracy.

Beside me, Seth twists his mouth angrily, then opens it and takes a loud, shuddering breath. I want to keep hating him—for living in my house and for all the things he's said about my father—but he looks suddenly so much like a little kid. There's an undertow to his despair, like gravity at the core of him, and I'm close enough that it tugs at me no matter how mean either one of us can get.

I unzip the butt purse and take out the picture of the woman on the table. Under Dr. Osborne's porch light I study it again, even though it's already permanently grafted onto my brain. Tracy moves up behind me and peers over my shoulder. She lets out a low whistle. On my hand, underneath the charred edge of the picture, you can still see all the hatch marks I made, like a complicated network of pale veins. I think of how hard I tried to pray and how clean and relieved I felt to quit. I think, with a kind of heaviness, of the way Seth and even Dr. Osborne have been knocking themselves out not to think anything that might make them feel what I feel every time I think about Cecil. Lust. I think of how hard it is to keep trying to do what's impossible, how exhausting. How even their efforts have become something to hide.

“It's the only one left,” I tell Dr. Osborne. “You can have it back. If you tell Seth you're sorry.”

I can feel Seth staring at the side of my face, but I don't turn my head. I hold Dr. Osborne's gaze until he finally looks down at the picture, and when he looks up at me again, some of the coldness has drained out of his expression. And now suddenly I see more of him than I want to, just like with Seth. I see the boy who wanted to live at my father's house instead of his own, who grew up into a man who tries too hard to help. In all the wrong ways. A man who has never known a woman, maybe never known anyone else at all. Not really. Not well enough. Loneliness is what's in the gravity coming from the center of Dr. Osborne. I'm getting the idea that every person on earth is their own black hole, and if you get too close, you get sucked right in. Meanness can pull you close, just like love does, but once you're there, once you see what's inside, you've hit a point of no return and you've got to carry it all, dense as a brick, heavy on your heart. And it would be easier if what you saw was evil, pure and simple as a big evil brain in a book. But when you get to the point of no return, all the evil and all the meanness just turn sad. My father said I would know my calling when it happened, the calling I prayed for when I still believed in it. But I never thought a calling could be something like this, this sad, straight sight into what's at the center of people. I never thought it would be something I had no idea what to do with.

“I'm not at my best tonight, Seth,” Dr. Osborne says finally. “I'm sorry.”

Seth takes off his glasses and rubs them on the hem of his shirt. He backs down from Dr. Osborne's porch without looking at me, turns on his heel, and heads for the sidewalk. Kelly-Lynn follows him, but Tracy waits.

I hand the picture to Dr. Osborne like I said I would. “What happened to her?” I ask. I can't help it.

“I don't know,” he admits, holding the picture with one hand, fingering the cross of nails again with the other. Then, inexplicably, he hands the picture back to me. Almost gently, like an offering. “Nothing good.”

I put the picture back in my purse. The streetlamps have come on now, and Tracy and I step off the porch and join Seth and Kelly-Lynn in a soft circle of light.

“You're not crying, are you?” Tracy says to Seth.

“No.”

“Creepy man,” says Kelly-Lynn, holding her watch up to the streetlamp. She holds the list up, too, then folds it into quarters and hands it to me. “Maybe we just blow this off?”

High above the last house on the street and over the field beyond, the cross on top of the water tower lights up with a low electric buzz that hits my ears like something much closer, an insect in my hair. Soon the whole Youth Group of First Community will gather on the hill for a brief reenactment of my grandfather's Great Revival. We were supposed to bring people, and that's what I did. I brought some people.

I catch myself planning how to report this evening to my father—whether I will write it to him or tell him in person—before I remember that he doesn't even have a vision for the county anymore. That such a vision may only have been the sickness talking in the first place. Like so many other things that were supposed to have come from God.

“Okay,” I say. “Let's blow this off.” I slip the list of scavenger hunt items into the purse, next to the picture, and we all head up the street to wait under the water tower for everyone else.

Other places in town have openings in the barbed-wire fence that give access to the field and to the seminary's softball diamond on the other side of the hill. But not here at the end of Elm. Seth uses both hands to pin down the top strand of the fence, and I go first, balancing my weight in the sway of the barbed wire. Then I hold my breath and launch myself over and into the field. The weeds have been recently mowed, the cuttings pushed into knee-high piles, and once everyone else is over the fence, we step carefully over the stiff, sharp stalks. “I never thought we'd be tramping through a field this way,” says Tracy. “Not for a church event. Not in town. We're going to be full of ticks.”

“I hate ticks,” Kelly-Lynn says, lifting her knees high.