The Patron Saint of Liars (6 page)

"You bet."

"Good," I said, "you're driving." I threw the keys over the hood and he caught them. It was a stupid thing to do, but I figured if something bad was going to happen, it would happen if I was driving or not. It would happen if I was awake or not. He got in the front and I got in the back. I asked him his name.

"Billy," he said.

"Listen, Billy, keep an eye on the thermostat. Don't let it overheat. Stay on Forty the whole time, promise. I'm going to get some sleep."

We got into the car and shut the doors. He asked if he could play the radio and I told him that would be fine. He looked carefully before pulling onto the interstate and then got quickly up to speed. If he played the radio at all, he waited until I was asleep. Asleep and driving at the same time. It was like a wonderful dream.

When I woke up it was dark and we weren't going anywhere. I thought that I had just pulled over to go to sleep, but then I remembered I hadn't been driving. I remembered Billy and felt a wave of panic moving up from the soles of my feet to my throat. When I looked out the window I saw him standing in a bright light, talking to another man. We were at a gas station. Billy gave the man some money and got back into the car.

"You're awake," he said. "I hope I didn't wake you up."

"Where are we?" I pushed the hair out of my face. I wanted a bath.

"Maybe a hundred miles west of Fort Smith. You've been asleep a long time."

I got out of the car and told him to slide over and let me drive for a while. He made sandwiches and cut up apples and we drank water out of one of the jugs.

"You didn't tell me your name," he said.

"Mary."

"It was nice of you to pick me up. I'd been waiting at that rest stop a couple of hours. I had a real good ride before that, almost six hours. Some trucker hauling oranges from California. But it wasn't as good as this ride, though." He stretched one arm out of the open window and let the wind blow it back. "I love to drive," he said. "Not everybody'd let you drive their car, but I've been driving since I was ten years old." He spoke quickly and his voice was anxious and high. "That's when my dad taught me. Soon as I was big enough to reach the pedals and see over the dashboard he had me driving a car. By the time I got my license it seemed almost funny, you know, 'cause I'd been driving for so long without one. That's what makes me so careful, all those years I drove without one. I had to make sure I never got pulled over 'cause then there'd really be hell to pay."

He looked happy, all fresh-faced and young, like he could stay up all night. I kept thinking I wasn't that much older than he was, but I felt like I could have been his mother. "Where did you say you were coming from?" I asked him.

He looked out at the road for a little while, trying to decide how much to tell me. "West," he said. "Just like your east."

"I've been west," I said.

"I'm going to see my folks," he said, still watching the road. "They're right before the Tennessee border, not too much off Forty, if you're going that far."

"I'm going that far."

"My father needs me at home. I got older sisters, but they're all married and gone. It's not like he's so old, my dad, but the place is too much for him and my mom to handle by themselves. I shouldn't have gone away in the first place. I'm all the help my dad's got now, nearly three hundred acres to work. It would be too much for anybody. Don't you think that's too much?"

I nodded, then took my eyes away from the road for a minute to look at him. "That's a lot," I said. You could tell what he would have looked like when he was young, the same way you could tell what Thomas was going to look like once he was old. His hair would have been redder, where it was nearly brown now. He would have been skinny with milky skin. "You're right to go back if that's what you think you should do."

Then he leaned back against the door. He seemed relieved somehow, like all he needed was for one other person to tell him, to forgive him for running away. It didn't take a lot to figure out he'd left the army someplace. "What about you," he said. "Why are you going east?"

"I'm going to get my sister Lucy down in Pensacola."

"She in trouble?"

"It's her husband," I told him. "He's been drinking a lot. It's gotten to be pretty bad for her. She's got kids and everything. But she's scared to go, you know how that is. She doesn't know what she's supposed to do. So I told her I'd come and get them."

"Where're you going to take them?"

"Home to live with me and my husband in New Mexico. We've got plenty of room. Maybe they'll want to stay on, I'm not sure. We'll have to see how it goes."

"One of my sisters' husbands ever crossed her, I'd kill him," Billy said in a tired voice. "That is, if my dad didn't kill him first."

I thought about this for a while. I had always wanted a sister. "I may kill him," I said. "I'll have to wait and see." But he didn't hear me, he'd already fallen asleep.

I ended up driving Billy right to his parents' place in Crawfordsville, Arkansas. It wasn't too much out of the way, and he said if I wanted to come in for something to eat and rest up for a while, that he was sure it would be all right with his family. "I've never had a ride like this before," he said. "To-your-door service."

The house wasn't much, but there was a whole lot of land. I stayed in the car while he went up to see his parents. He would be telling them a lie, some lie about getting out that he would have to keep up with for the rest of his life, if he was never caught. You could see on their faces how glad they were to have him back, how much they'd missed him.

"You shouldn't have been picking up hitchhikers, young lady," his father said to me. "But you couldn't have picked up a better one than this fellow here."

I couldn't seem to get enough to eat at dinner, even though his mother brought out food like she'd been expecting us. I ate like I was desperate. I wanted to touch everything in the house, the backs of the chairs, the family photographs, the bowls that lined the cupboards. It seemed like the first time I'd been someplace in years, even though I'd had a home of my own just four days before. When they asked me to spend the night I was grateful. I was only a day's drive away from Saint Elizabeth's and suddenly I felt I had all the time in the world. What would the difference be, a day or two? My stomach was still flat, though harder now. I looked at it for a long time in the bathtub that night, deep in the hot water, beneath a film of soap, and thought, remember this, it won't be like this again. I went to sleep in Billy's sister's room, in a single bed with a yellow flowered bedspread. I went to sleep in a girl's room in her parents' house, where people talked in quiet voices downstairs and the windows were open and the night blew in from the fields. I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.

Billy woke me up, shaking my shoulder, saying, Mary, Mary, in a whisper. He was kneeling beside my bed in his pajamas. Maybe he was only ten or twelve. Maybe he woke up in the night and was afraid and went to his sister.

"I have to tell you something," he said.

It was such a deep sleep, I had a hard time coming up. I wasn't afraid, or even surprised to see him there. "What is it?" I said softly.

"I didn't tell you the truth," he said. "I went AWOL. I just left and bought these clothes. I buried my uniform back in Arizona."

I reached out and touched his head, ran my hand along the side of his face. It was still warm from sleep. I wanted to take him to bed with me, just to keep him under my arm until he could rest again. "Don't worry," I said.

"I've got to worry. What if they find me?"

"They've got lots of guys," I said. I didn't want to wake up, not completely.

"You think I should tell my folks?" he whispered.

"You should do whatever you want to, whatever you can live with best."

He sat back on his heels and looked at me. He reached out very tentatively and touched my hair. "I know you're lying, too," he said quietly. "And if you need to stay here, I think it would be just fine." He stayed for a while longer, just looking at me. Then he got up and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

In the morning I didn't know for sure if he'd been there or not. I never knew for sure. I left before anyone was up.

3

I
GAVE
Interstate 40 up in Nashville. When you don't have a home, it's easy to get attached to things, people, highways. Wherever you are the longest starts to feel like the place you're supposed to be, and I had been on 40 since California. Now I was on 65 going north. Then the Green River Parkway up toward Owensboro. I had good directions. You'd think I would have known by then that all roads are more or less the same, but as I pulled off the exit for Habit I started to think there was a lot out there I hadn't seen, and I wondered if maybe I should.

I found a gas station off the highway and went in to ask about Saint Elizabeth's. I knew how to get to the town but not more than that. There was a woman sitting in front of the station, sunning herself while three children who I guessed were hers sat dully in a small inflatable swimming pool half full of water. They were dark-haired and tan and they all three looked to be about the same size. It was hard to tell because they were sitting down. One of them tried to splash me as I walked by, but the water fell short, making a little muddy spot in the dust.

"Excuse me," I said to the woman. I was waking her up. I didn't want to, but I didn't know what else to do.

"Ma!" one of the children screamed. "Somebody wants gas."

The woman blinked her eyes open and pulled up the top of her blouse, which she had down below her shoulders to get some color on her chest. She looked exactly like the children in the pool. They were only smaller, tanner versions of their mother. She shook the sleep off of her. "Sorry," she said. "I drifted off."

"No," I said. "It's so hot. I know."

She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. I imagined she didn't do a lot of business. She looked over to the pool. One of the girls was trying to hold another girl's face under the water, but there really wasn't enough water to do it right. The boy sat on the edge, watching. "Stop that," the woman said to them without much enthusiasm.

"What I need are directions, really," I said. "I'm looking for Saint Elizabeth's."

The woman's expression changed. She looked back at her children again and then back at me. "Up there," she said, her voice flat. "Three miles past town. On the left." Then she turned around and headed inside the station.

"Can I get some gas?" I said. I had half a tank, but I didn't want to have woken her up just for directions.

"You got enough to get you there," she said, and went inside.

"Boo," one of the girls in the swimming pool said.

It wasn't until I was back in the car and driving again that I realized what had happened. That just by saying where I was going she would know all of my business. She didn't like it, either.

If I drove through a town, I didn't see it. Habit was nothing but two stores and a dozen or so houses that were closer together than the others. Saint Elizabeth's, on the other hand, would have been nearly impossible to miss. I came over the top of a hill and there it was, sitting back from the road. It was giant and white and looked more like a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon, than a home for unwed mothers. I guess there was nothing peculiar about it as a building. It was beautiful because it was impressive; spires and latticework, jutting balconies, arched windows. It was just so completely out of place. Kentucky had been all mountains and fields of tobacco so far. I couldn't imagine who would have built a place like this here. Who would have looked all over and come to the top of this hill in Kentucky, driven down the first stake and said, here's the place we're putting it.

But I got my answer soon enough. I pulled the car up near the front steps and got out to read a brass historical marker. That's where I first heard the history of Saint Elizabeth's, the Hotel Louisa and the spring. It told the story of how the Clatterbucks and the Nelsons came together, about a child named June falling ill and the wealthy horse breeder who built a hotel for a spring that eventually dried up. The letters were tiny and they managed to pack a lot of information on the sign. When I finished, I looked up to the massive front double doors and felt a sinking feeling all the way down to my feet. There was no more time, no more traveling. I had arrived. I read the sign again and then again. I thought about getting back into my car.

I must have made a sorry picture standing there, taking such an incredible interest in the hotel's history. The suitcase beside me was so small it looked like something a child would take to spend the night with a friend. I rubbed my ankle up against it.

"It's an interesting history," a woman said. I turned and found a nun beside me, one who was obviously skilled in moving quietly from place to place. She wasn't much more than five feet tall and was completely covered in white cloth, head to foot. She was clearly of a different breed than the nuns I was used to seeing in California. "You've come to stay with us?" she said, keeping her eyes on the sign, possibly so as not to frighten me off.

I told her I was.

"We always know the girls who are coming to stay," she said. "Of course, sometimes you can just tell, but even when you can't, they're the ones who read the sign. We used to wait for them to come inside themselves, but they could read this sign for hours. Once a girl stood here halfway through the night, then she just went away and we never saw her again." She reached down and picked up my bag. "Didn't bring much, did you? Well, that doesn't matter. Clothes are the one thing we have plenty of." She asked me my name.

"Rose," I said, "Martha Rose Clinton."

"I'm Sister Bernadette," she said, and then she stopped and looked at me. She tilted back her head, so that the light fell under her visor. She was possibly thirty herself, with small, bright eyes. She reached up and pushed some hair that had fallen into my face back in place behind my ear. "Mother Corinne hates to see girls with hair in their eyes. And you have such a pretty face, Rose." She touched my cheek for a moment and smiled at me. "You'll be glad," she said.