The Guineveres (41 page)

“Let's go,” I said. My voice reverberated off the walls of the stairwell.

“You go alone,” she said. She sat on the bottom step and tucked her knees to her chin, then rocked back and forth.

I nudged her with my foot from behind. “But Your Boy is waiting,” I said.

She sat there unmoving, her body forming a ball when she tucked her head in the space between her arms. “I don't want to see him.”

“He needs you, Gwen. Now, more than ever.” I touched her warm shoulder, but she shrugged me off.

“I don't know.”

“We're part of the War Effort,” I said, thinking about what Win would say in this moment, how she could reason with Gwen, reminding her that visiting Our Boys was our civic duty. “When he wakes up, don't you want to be able to tell him that you were here all along? Don't you want to go home with him?”

“It's not that simple, Vere,” Gwen said. She stood now and turned, and even though I stood on the step above her, she was taller than me. “I'm not a saint,” she said.

“Nobody is.”

“You are,” she said, her words pushed into my chest like fingers. I stepped back, injured by her tone. “You make it look so easy.”

“Make what look so easy?” I asked.

“Being good,” she said. Her voice came out soft. She wasn't being mean-spirited. At least, I don't think she was. “It's hard to live with a saint.” She pushed open the door to the Sick Ward where Our Boys waited.

Inside, a humidifier hummed, which usually meant illness. I darted to My Boy's bed, but he appeared okay, and when I touched his forehead I didn't detect a fever. I whispered to him that I was there, right by his side. That I'd always be. I'd never leave him, no matter what. “It's Guinevere,” I said to him. “It's Guinevere. It's Guinevere,” I kept repeating as though reciting a prayer. I drew my hand through his hair, then down his neck. His skin felt smooth and even, softer than my own, and I kept touching him because he was My Boy to touch.

I leaned over to kiss his forehead, and at that moment I heard Gwen's muted sobs in the dark, high-pitched like the whining of a dog. Afraid she'd wake the others, I went to her, held out my arm to drape her shoulder. But she knocked my hand away, an injured animal pawing at the dark, and I knew better than to try again. I sat down next to her on the bed, and we stayed like that for a while until I felt Gwen lean into me, sinking her head on my shoulder, then finally letting her entire body slink down and rest on my lap. Her hair smelled of soured butter. I didn't say anything, only ran my fingers through it, then rested my palm on the top of her head, praying—if He could hear me—to help ease her suffering. Because if there's anything I'd learned by then, by now, too, it's that suffering doesn't always have a point. Sometimes there's nothing to learn from it.

The next day was the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Gwen and I served in the mass, but our eyes were heavy from the long night before. Father James appeared tired, too. The bags under his eyes looked like little canoes that were keeping his eyeballs afloat. He didn't talk to us in the vestry as we dressed. Instead, he sat on the couch with his eyes shut until the music began. To make up for Win's absence, he'd already placed the processional cross in its stand on the altar. He carried the Bible, Gwen held the large candle, and I did my best to evenly distribute the incense smoke as we walked up the aisle.

He opened the mass by reminding us that we were all sinners, that we'd always be sinners; it was our nature. He reminded the parishioners of the sacrifices Saints Peter and Paul had made, the greatest, most selfless sacrifice that anyone could make: their lives. Mr. and Mrs. Drexel nodded their heads slowly throughout opening prayers.

During the homily, Father James stepped away from the pulpit. He stood at the edge of the altar, gesturing with his hands spread like branches of a tree. “What are you willing to give your life for? To whom are you willing to give it?” he asked again and again of the parishioners before him. Mrs. Drexel began to cry onto her husband's shoulder. The missing never eased for her. The missing was part of the War.

During the sermon, Gwen stood in the back corner of the altar, half covered in shadows. I could tell she wasn't even paying attention. Instead, she studied the crucifix perched high above on the wall of the church. Our Savior bared His chest, unclothed from the waist up. His ribs protruded and His muscles flexed with His arms outstretched as they were. I couldn't help feeling sorry for Him up there, blanched with pain, even though He probably felt sorry for me, down here, and even though that's not what I was supposed to feel when I looked at the crucifix.

Father James disrobed in silence after mass, and so did we. He cleared his throat a few times and finally turned toward us, as though he were going to say something, but he stopped himself before any words escaped his lips. He ducked back into the closet, grabbed a bottle of wine, and headed for the door. But before he could get there, Gwen grabbed his sleeve and broke the silence. “Can I have a moment, Father?” she asked.

“Not now,” he said. He clasped the wine bottle by its head, turned it upside down like a baton.

“But, Father,” she said.

“Not today,” he said.

“You said I—” She couldn't finish her sentence before Father James interrupted.

“I said not today, girl. Now that is that,” he snapped. His fist became a white, bloodless barnacle around the wine bottle. He released his grip, then tucked the wine beneath his armpit, and he stood for a moment with his eyes aflutter. We thought he might say something more, so we waited. But he didn't. He exited the room without a sound, closing the door to the vestry behind him.

Gwen appeared helpless, standing there in her wool skirt, her skin purple-colored at the knees. She clenched her jaw, and veins popped at her temples. With her index finger, she smoothed down her eyebrows; then she calmly gathered her hair and pulled it to the side.

“Gwen?” I asked.

She said nothing, just smirked with half her mouth. And then, without warning, she swung open the door and bolted. Pumping her arms, she sprinted down the hall, toward Father James's office, her feet sliding on tile as she rounded corners.

He wasn't there. Gwen paced frantically around the room, first sitting on the couch, then bursting toward the sideboard to pour herself a glass of water. She turned in circles as she drank. Finally, she plopped herself in Father James's chair, opened his drawer, and pulled out his bottle of Sunny Brook. Tipping back the bottle, she took a glug and wiped her mouth. Then she rummaged through his drawer some more as if she were digging through sand.

“Come on,” I said, checking behind me to make sure nobody was coming. “Let's go.” I wished Win were there. She'd have known what to do.

“You go,” she said.

“Gwen…”

“Go,” she said. “I wish you'd just leave already. Nobody wants you here.”

I opened my mouth, but no words would come out. My head felt hot; my breath steamed but did not shape sounds. I heard thumping in my ears. Gwen propped her feet on the desk, the way Father James sometimes did. A sticker was stuck to the bottom of her shoe, from one of the younger girls' sticker collections.

“Gwen,” I said, moving closer to her. I felt dizzy in this moment; maybe I knew what was coming next.

“Go.” Her voice growled, full of venom now. “Please. Leave. I don't want you here.” As she said this, her lip curled into a snarl that reminded me of Sister Fran when angry. But Gwen looked so pretty, even now. And that's when she spoke those words. “We're not The Guineveres anymore.”

We all have moments that define us, moments that we can call to mind years later and remember what we felt, what we thought, how the air shifted in the room around us until we felt breathless and we knew nothing in the world could ever be the same. This was that moment for me. Hearing Gwen speak those words, that simple sentence that began with “we” but ended with me standing in front of Father James's mahogany desk, I felt I'd been unplugged from a circuit. My legs became liquid; I could barely stand, so I walked backward, toward the still-open door. I was waiting for Gwen to take back what she'd said, but she didn't. She just sat there smugly with her lips bent and parted, an imitation of a smile.

Years later, after Gwen apologized for everything else, and after I forgave her—what choice did I have?—that one sentence I could never forget. For at that moment, and for the first time since my mother left me here, I came face-to-face with the unutterable truth: I was alone.

 

Saint Christina the Astonishing

FEAST DAY: JULY 24

The most astonishing saint of them all was Christina, born to a peasant family in 1150. By the age of fifteen, she was orphaned, and by twenty-two she suffered a seizure so severe she was presumed dead. They laid out her brittle body, then carried her to the church in an open coffin for a funeral mass. The church was full of mourners, including her sisters, who wept out of pity for Christina and for themselves. Christina, along with both of their parents, had passed to the hereafter within only a few years of each other, and the sisters had the crushing feeling they were next. The other townsfolk wept, too. Christina may have been a peculiar kind of girl, but she came from good Christian stock, and as with any death, they were reminded of the ephemeral nature of the human condition. They gazed at the gray-pale Christina, wondering about their own fates.

And then, as the priest uttered the Agnus Dei, Christina sat up in her coffin, looked around with wild, animal eyes, then levitated up to the rafters, where she stayed until the last of the townsfolk had fled, their throats raw from screaming.

“Please come down from there,” the priest beckoned, enticing her with a morsel of food, a spot of water. He clutched holy water beneath his sleeve. She obeyed the priest, grabbed the water chalice with two fists, and took hungry gulps.

“I could not stand the smell of sinful human flesh,” she said, explaining herself. “I had to go up there to escape it,” she said, pointing up.

Christina told the priest she hadn't been dead, not at all. Instead, she'd been to hell, where she recognized several folks, then to purgatory, where she recognized even more, and then, finally, to heaven, where she was told she must return to earth to do penance for the sinful, for those stuck below and beyond. “You shall endure many torments, but you shall die from none of these acts,” a white-winged angel had told her.

“My life will be so extraordinary that nothing like it will ever been seen,” she told the priest, who first checked her forehead for fever and then checked his own.

From this point, Christina found herself fearless, boundless. She crawled into blazing ovens, fire licking her skin, but suffered not a single burn. During the coldest winter months, she'd dash into the river, letting it carry her downstream to the mill, where the wheel whirled around her, scraping her numb, purple-mottled skin. She'd climb trees and perch there in storms, even as the wind lashed her and rain pricked her face. Christina allowed vicious dogs to lay chase to her, would wrestle them into thorny bushes, and she'd receive not a scar.

Yet she could smell it on them, on others, the scent of sin, spoiled like meat, sickly sweet. Like an old person. Like stagnant water. Like decaying wood. Like waste. She couldn't stand to be indoors, where the smell assaulted her senses, so she slept on rocks and begged for food, and when she couldn't find enough, the heavenly hosts provided. During those times, she could feel her breasts grow heavy, and she'd find a quiet corner where she'd suckle herself, drinking the sweetest, freshest milk she'd ever tasted. Her hair grew wild like a peacock's tail, yet her skin stayed milky white.

From time to time, her sisters, weary of Christina's odd behavior—of the reports from the town that she was again swinging from branches of the tallest tree or rolling through the streets like a human barrel—would chain Christina to her bed. Yet she always found a way to break free, and when she did, she'd run to the forest, whoop-whooping the entire way, like the call of a bird returning to its nest.

Only there, only in the quiet of the forest, the light peeking through the canopy of trees, could she find calm. The shrubs didn't judge her when she broke into gallops or hit herself over the head with a fallen branch. The animals didn't stop to stare when she'd cry out wildly to the heavens, “More! More!” or when she'd bound from tree to tree, swinging her arms like a monkey. Sometimes she felt so much, so deeply, and these outbursts were her only relief, like her skin would explode from the heat of her passions. Other times, Christina felt nothing at all, the even, velvet numbness of intoxication.

There, in the forest, she'd walk barefooted, admiring the texture of bark, the shapes of roots running in and out of the ground like snakes, the mushroom caps that resembled little huts. She didn't want to return to the town, but she knew she must. Her sisters would worry, and she meant them no harm.

At these times, she'd grow quiet, levitate to the sky, and hang there like a cloud or like a white bird, midflight. She didn't know what to do with the powers she'd been given. She hadn't meant to be so astonishing.

 

The Assumption

The long year wound its way back again, and we were not the same girls. We sweated in the heat of the hazy August sun at the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration's annual festival, where only a year before we'd tried to run away. So much had happened since, and we understood the enormity of heartbreak, the pain that comes from unconditional love. We were tired. The year had exhausted us. Ginny left us; Win was taken; we met Our Boys; we loved Our Boys. We wanted to go home, and yet here we were, still. Again. The old folks were lined up in their wheelchairs with balloons tied to them; they appeared on the verge of an eternal sleep. We thought of Mr. Macker, by now settled into heaven, if such a place existed.