The Patron Saint of Liars (36 page)

"I'm in Habit," I said when someone answered, but then I was crying and I couldn't make myself stop. Sister Evangeline took the phone from my hand.

"We're at Saint Elizabeth's," she said. "We need an ambulance." There was a pause and I looked at her. "Yes," she said and waited. "Yes." She put her hand over the receiver. "Can you drive there? He says it will be a lot faster if someone can drive him up."

"Mom's not here," I said.

"Can you drive there?" she said to me again.

I looked at her. Her face was clear. She was looking at me so hard that it made me calm down for a minute. "Yes, I can drive."

"She'll drive him there," Sister said into the phone. "Yes."

Sister Evangeline hung up the phone and put a hand on each of my arms. "Listen to me, Cecilia. You pull yourself together right now. You're the grown-up now. Do you understand me? No tears." She wiped beneath my eyes with her thumbs. "I'll wait for your mother. I'll send her up just as soon as she comes, but for right now it's on you."

I nodded at her.

"Go on now," she said. "Give your father my love."

I went out the kitchen door, fast but more careful, and who was standing there but Lorraine.

"Sweet Jesus," she said, looking pale herself.

"Come on," I said. "Help me."

We went up to the shed and I backed out the car. I did what my mother said. I looked behind me. I kept it straight. It was strange to feel the rubber pedals under my bare feet, and I curled my toes around the top of them. Lorraine sat beside me, looking at me like I was a maniac. "What's going on here?" she said.

"My father's been hurt," I said. "We have to take him to Owensboro."

"Hurt," she said. "Hurt like how?" She reached over to wipe off one of my knees with the hem of her skirt.

"He cut his head," I said.

"Oh," she said, sighing. "It's not like a heart attack or anything."

"No," I said, and felt better then for some reason, thinking of something worse that it wasn't. "Do you know how to drive?" I asked her, suddenly hopeful.

"No," she said. "Christ, don't you?"

"Yeah," I said.

I cut across the back pasture, driving through the dried creek bed where the spring used to be. I was too scared about other things to be scared about driving. I pulled the Dodge right up to the front steps and got out of the car. I left it running, the door wide open. Lorraine crawled over the bench seat and out my side. My father was still there. I don't know why this surprised me. I had been afraid for some reason that he'd be gone.

"Dad?" I said. I tried to kneel beside him but my knees hurt when they hit the wooden planks. I came up again then squatted down on my toes. The tablecloth was red in the front, but not all the way around. I took this to be a good sign. "Dad," I said again, "Lorraine's here."

"Hi, Son," she said. All of the girls called my father by his first name.

Dad's eyes blinked open and he smiled at me. "I'm feeling better," he said. "Hi, Lorraine," he said. He didn't look at her.

"You're going to have to help us get you in the car," I said. "Can you get up okay?" Not that I knew what I was going to do if he said no.

"Sure," he said, keeping still. "I just passed out. The sight of blood always gets to me, even when it's mine. I don't think it was anything so big." He sounded so conversational, chatty, like we were talking about baseball scores or something. "Is your mother here?"

"She'll be right behind us," I said. I looked up at Lorraine, who was holding onto the porch railing, looking sick.

"I'm not so good with blood myself," Lorraine said.

"Get over it," I hissed at her. "Come here, get on the other side of him." Lorraine came and stood on the other side of my father. She stared at me like an idiot. "Take his arm," I said.

I counted to three and then Lorraine and I pulled and Dad sat up. He touched his hand to his head. "I'll be fine," he said. We got him on his feet and over to the porch railing. We were only steadying him. We stood beside him, one on each side, and helped him down the steps. He put his arm on my shoulder and leaned into it with his hand. "Lie down in the backseat. Put your head up against the door." My father seemed so relieved once he was actually in the car. I got one of the couch pillows, one that wasn't as stained as the others, and leaned over the front seat and put it under his head.

"This is good," he said to me. "Everything will be fine now."

Lorraine got in on the passenger side and I closed my door. I remembered again that I didn't have any shoes on and thought for a minute about running upstairs for some, but I just wanted to go. I turned the car onto the dirt road and headed out past Saint Elizabeth's to the Green River Parkway.

Once you get on the parkway, it's pretty much a straight shot up to Owensboro, but I was used to driving with my mother. She told me when to speed up and slow down, when it was safe to go.

"You really shouldn't be driving, honey," my father said from the backseat.

"I thought you knew how to drive," Lorraine said. "Look, I'm going to have a baby—"

"Don't be stupid," I said to her. "I'm driving, aren't I?" I should have been nicer to Lorraine. The truth was, I needed her.

"She's a good driver," Dad said. He was coming around, I could tell by his voice. Dad had never driven with me before.

"What happened to you?" I said, glancing back at him in my rearview mirror. There were too many cars on the road. My hands were sweating. I thought there was a chance I would kill all of us, me and Dad, Lorraine and her baby.

"It was just dumb," he said. "I went into the basement without turning the lights on and I walked straight into a low beam. Forty years I've been going into that basement. You'd think I'd know where everything was by now."

"You cut your head at Saint Elizabeth's?" I couldn't believe this.

"In the basement," he repeated.

"And you walked all the way home? Why didn't you go upstairs and get help?"

"I didn't think it was that bad. I knew it was bleeding and I didn't want to walk in and scare one of the girls."

"That's so nice," Lorraine said.

"It is not nice!" I said. I was panicked. I saw my father walking across the back pasture, half blind. I saw him falling down in the grass, nowhere close to the house. I wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and scream at both of them. "What if I hadn't been home?" I said. "You could have bled to death! You could have just lay there on the front porch all day." I tightened my hands around the steering wheel.

"Don't get so upset," my father said. "Nothing bad's happened."

But something terrible had happened. I was driving a car I wasn't so sure how to drive to a place I'd never driven to. I had seen my father covered in blood. I saw him fall down right in front of me. I saw that he was old and that I couldn't pick him up. I saw a way that he could die.

"I've never been to Owensboro before," Lorraine said. "I was sick the last time everybody went up for mass."

There were signs for the hospital. I didn't have any trouble finding it. I pulled into the emergency entrance, barely missing a parked car on my left side. There were men there waiting with a wheelchair. They didn't look like they were waiting for anyone in particular. One of the guys was sitting in it, smoking a cigarette. They helped my father in while Lorraine and I stood and watched. I gave one of them the car keys. I was happy to be rid of them.

"I love this hospital," my dad said. "This is where you were born."

I rolled my eyes behind him. A nurse came up and started asking us questions. She handed me a clipboard with a pile of forms pinned on top. She stared at me for a minute and then came back with another wheelchair. "Sit down," she said to me.

"Sissy," Dad said. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," I said. "It's your blood. You go on." I kissed my father on the cheek, just below his red turban, and then they wheeled him away.

"Sit," the nurse said.

"Sit down," Lorraine said, and put her hand on my shoulder, guiding me into the chair. The nurse bent over and looked at my knees and my hands. "You might need a stitch or two yourself." I straightened out my legs and looked at my knees. There were long stripes of blood going down my shins and onto my feet. My feet were incredibly dirty.

She took me back to an empty room and washed out the cuts with soapy water while Lorraine stood behind me and patted my hair in a way I found unbelievably annoying. The nurse swabbed the cuts with iodine, which hurt like hell, and then wrapped everything up neatly. "You'll be okay like that," she said. "It wasn't too bad, once I got them all cleaned out. Just sit for a while, okay? No running around."

Lorraine wheeled me back out into the lobby, taking the red vinyl chair beside me for herself. One of the orderlies came up and gave me back the car keys. We sat there quietly, just soaking it all in. Things with my father weren't so bad. He was fine, like he said he was. People cut themselves all the time and sometimes they pass out. No big deal. But what I kept hearing was Lorraine saying heart attack. I thought of my father's heart, attacking him from the inside, the two of us in the house alone, and what could I do but stand there and watch him? Something had shifted imperceptibly between us in those few minutes on the porch. All these years my father had been wondering how he was going to take care of me, how he was going to protect me from things. I remember how nervous he was when I was old enough to walk to school alone. He walked behind me, staying a block or two away the whole time, trying to hide behind trees and not realizing they just don't make trees that big. I knew he was there, Christ, everybody knew he was there, but I kept my eyes straight ahead. I was old enough to walk to school alone. If he wouldn't let me, then I'd just pretend.

But now I'd seen him look old. I'd seen him grab for something and fall down just the same, and I didn't begin to know how I was going to be able to protect him from things. It was just the two of us in that house. Even though my mother lived just across the field, it would not be close enough. I wouldn't be able to count on someone else and my father would be counting on me.

"Guess this is where I'll be soon enough," Lorraine said, patting her stomach.

Just the sound of her voice was jarring. I was too far away in my own thoughts to remember that she had problems of her own to worry about. I was always forgetting Lorraine was pregnant. She wore loose tops and as far as I could tell she wasn't showing at all. She just seemed too dumb to be pregnant, too much of a kid. She wasn't like the girls who came to Saint Elizabeth's, Those girls seemed glamorous, even when they weren't much older than me. "You nervous?" I said, picking at the edge of the gauze around my hand.

Lorraine twisted up her mouth and looked down the long green corridor to the double doors where they took people away. "Sure," she said. "I don't know. I mean, it's still a long way off, a lot of things could happen."

"What? Like your boyfriend coming back?"

She laughed. "He wasn't exactly my boyfriend. Naw, I mean something else. I don't know what, but something. I've been kinda getting into this whole Catholic thing here, praying to saints, confession, miracles. I've been taking communion and praying to Saint Theresa." She reached down inside her shirt and brought up a medal on a silver chain. "See, that's Saint Theresa, the little flower. Sister Bernadette gave it to me. She told me to just keep praying and everything would work out all right."

"You're not supposed to take communion," I said. "You're not even Catholic."

She dropped the medal back into her shirt but kept one finger on top of it. "Nobody knows that except you. I don't see how it could make any difference anyway. What kind of saint would Theresa be if she only paid attention to Catholics?"

I wanted to tell her she shouldn't bother. I'd seen it. All of it. Girls who thought they were going to be saved and girls who thought they would keep their babies in the end. Nothing works out. But then I figured it wasn't my place. If wearing a medal made her happy, then what the hell difference did it make to me?

Then all of the sudden my mother came in with Mother Corinne. The two of them were walking up the hall about ninety miles an hour. "Over here," I said, waving.

"You're in a wheelchair!" my mother said. "Sister Evangeline said it was Son. My God, what's happened?"

I stood up to show them I could. My mother was wearing a dress because she'd been at the doctor's. It just that minute occurred to me they must have been in Owensboro that morning. They must have driven back. "I'm fine," I said. "I just fell and scraped my knees."

"She's really fine," Lorraine said, like she was some kind of Greek chorus or something.

"Dad hit his head in the basement and cut it up pretty bad, so I brought him up here."

"You drove here?" my mother said.

"Well, what was I supposed to do, wait for you to get home?"

"You shouldn't have brought Lorraine," Mother Corinne said, her hands locked together in one angry knot. "She's a minor. She's the responsibility of Saint Elizabeth's."

"She needed my help," Lorraine said, looking down at the floor.

"You never should have driven here," my mother said. "You don't even have a license."

"What is this? I was the one who was home. I was the one who did what they were supposed to do."

"I'm driving Lorraine home," Mother Corinne said, and put a heavy hand on Lorraine's shoulder like she was some kind of juvenile delinquent. "The two of you can work this out yourselves."

"I did need Lorraine," I said furiously. "She helped me get him in the car. I needed some help, and Lorraine was the only person who was home. Don't make her feel like she's done something."

Lorraine looked up at me and a wave of pure gratitude came over her face. "I'll see you at home," she said quietly, and the two of them went down the hall. Mother Corinne's skirts swung out to the side when she walked and nearly swallowed Lorraine up whole.

"I know this was hard for you," my mother said once they were gone. "But you should have thought things through. You should have just called an ambulance and waited. You could have done a lot more damage to everyone by driving here."