The Suicide Motor Club (11 page)

The
Bereaved

“SISTER CLARE, YOU HAVE A VISITOR,” NATHALIE SAID. HER VOICE SOUNDED
strange in Jude's ear even though she was technically Jude's best friend.

“A visitor?”

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“A man.”

“Is it my father?”

“He didn't say he was your father. He told me a name and it's gone right out of my head. And I even had a trick to remember it.” Her voice seemed to be swallowed by the oaken joints of the hallway outside the chandlery.

“Thank you, Sister Anne,” Jude said. The two young women addressed each other by their new names as often as possible to help one another remember. Jude still thought of herself as Jude, and she was sure the same was true for the girl who used to be Nathalie. It would take getting used to. As would the silence. Sister Clare had not heard Sister Anne speak, prayers and singing aside, for two days now.

The other novice turned to go, but then she turned back and faced her friend. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It was something to
do with a candle, I should certainly be able to remember that, as many as we make. Chandler? No. Wicklow. That's it. His name is Mr. Wicklow.”

“I don't know a Mr. Wicklow,” Judith whispered back.

“Well,” Sister Anne said, “he seems to know you.”

“Did he say what it was about?”

“Not a hint. Except that it was urgent.”

“What about Mother Superior? Will I be allowed to see him?”

“You weren't supposed to be. He spoke first to me, and I did my best to shoo him off, but he wasn't having any. I heard Mother Superior speak to him although I didn't hear the words. Whoever he is, he's very persuasive.”

“Am I to miss Sext?”

“No, of course not. You'll see him just after. You'll have to miss lunch, but I'll save you some. I hear it's beets.”

“We had beets yesterday.”

“Apparently we didn't eat enough of them. The Lord has made us rich with beets.”

“Well, yes, please save me what you can. Where did you put him?”

“On the bench in the visitation room. I told him it would be better if he came before Vespers, and he said a very odd thing.”

“Which was?”

“He said Sext was better, he knew what Sext was. He seemed like a priest.”

“Maybe he is. That's not so odd,” Judith said.

“That's not the odd part.”

“Tell me already.”

“Patience is a virtue.”

“So is silence,” Judith said, “and we're not doing so well with that.”

Nathalie smiled. Judith liked her smile. The women stood so close their heads nearly touched.

“He said he wouldn't come at Vespers because he'd come from far away.”

“So?”

“He said he wouldn't drive at night.”

“Is he old?”

“No. He has glasses, but not like Mr. Magoo.”

“I still don't see what's so odd.”

“He said he wouldn't drive at night because it wasn't safe for him.”

Judith held her breath.

She saw that her friend was going to speak again.

“Sisters,” Mother Superior called from down the hall as she passed on her way to the office. Brightly but with a note of rebuke.

Judith's eyes begged Nathalie to tell her more.

When she saw that the young novices had not separated, Mother Mary Catherine stopped her busy walk and faced them. “Our Lord keeps no company with whisperers,” she said.

“Sister Anne,” Judith said.

Nathalie bowed and turned her feet as if to move away.

“Nathalie,”
Judith hissed, imploring.

Mother Superior started walking toward them.

Nathalie spoke.

“He said
you
would know why it's not safe to drive at night.”

Judith ran toward the visitation room.

—

THE MAN SAT ON THE BENCH LOOKING PHYSICALLY SMALL BUT SOMEHOW LARGE,
as though he exceeded the boundaries of his skin. His small, wire-frame glasses intensified rather than diluted his gaze, which settled on Judith and made her flush with warmth. He closed his eyes in an overlong blink, less from fatigue or shyness than from courtesy; his was a gaze that might stir dust devils from a heap of ash. She walked to him
in fast, long strides and he stood, taking his hat in his hands, then setting it on the bench, meeting her eyes again. He had the dark hair and good posture of a man of thirty-five, but he had seen too much of something and he carried it. He smiled, and the smile was brightened by the darkness he carried behind it. He offered his hand through the iron grate that separated them—how like a cage it looked—and, even though she knew it was against the order's rules, she took its cool, uncallused strength in hers. She opened her mouth to speak but didn't know what to say, so he spoke.

“Judith Anabelle Lamb?”

She nodded.

“My name is Phillip Wicklow. I am one of a group who call ourselves the Bereaved, and with good reason. I have come to tell you that the statements you made to the Arizona State Police concerning what you saw on the night of May 13, 1967, are accurate. Your husband was murdered by people who died some time ago but who persist because they prey on the living. Your abducted son, Glendon, is almost certainly dead, but we intend to find and destroy the beings responsible for your tragedy, and we believe you can help us do that. We have evidence that your status as a nun, even a novice, will grant you some power to harm them. Are you interested in that? Harming those who took your family from you? Stopping them from harming others?”

She mouthed a word but gave it no voice.

Yes.

“Excellent. Then I'll need you to pack your things, if you have any things, and come with me. Try to appease the good woman I see politely monitoring us through the window and get her to grant you a leave of absence from the abbey. If you can't, we hope to strike before you are formally expelled for abandoning your post, which could take a month or more. Even if you are expelled, your faith and
your familiarity with sacred paraphernalia still make you dangerous to them. Mrs. Lamb, are you in or out?”

“How long do I have to decide?”

“Do you see the car just across the street from the property?”

She looked. A nondescript yellow car sat hunched against the new, green corn.

“I'll need you in that car within the hour. If you come with me, you will have difficult and dangerous work to do, and you will find out things about the true nature of creation that you cannot unlearn. If not, the world needs candles, too. But I will not be back, and you will never find me.”

She felt a breeze on her face, warm and faintly sweet with rot; a trio of crows hopped and gathered near a grayish smear on the pavement.

“May I ask you a question?” she said.

“Whatever you like.”

“Are you a priest?”

He looked down and away, aiming his gaze at the crows and their banquet.

“I was.”

—

“MY FIRST THOUGHT IS THAT I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'LL DO WITHOUT YOU.”

Nathalie said it as Jude made her bed again, yanking the corners crisp and tight. The room seemed very small, what with the whole world outside breathing on the window glass.

“Aside from a mountain of penance for missing Sext and maybe lunch while I say good-bye. Now you say, ‘Who's saving beets for
you
, Sister Anne.' Except you're too upset to joke. That man upset you, of course he did. It's why your hands are shaking. It's why you're leaving. It has to do with your tragedy, doesn't it? Of course it does. He
brought bad news that sounds like good news, brought it like a bee bringing pollen in its baskets. I would ask you to stay and think about it, at least until I could sit and listen in the chicory and Queen Anne's lace. Maybe I would hear God's little voice telling me if you are really supposed to go or not. To whatever place you're going, someplace that scares you, that much is clear. Don't forget to be safe. Don't forget to write me, please. We're like sisters, blood sisters, I mean. We started together. I guess I thought we might always be here, gardening, singing. That we would always know each other. Maybe Sister Mary Monica would say this was right, you leaving, I mean; that being close to you distracts me from prayer and contemplation. That it delays the trial of solitude that makes the silence from which we hear God's bigger voice. But that's all right for her, she has Sister Columbine, and those close friendships are permitted for the older sisters. I guess they're afraid, well, you know what they're afraid of. Oh, it hurts me to see your hands shake like that. Are you still Sister Clare? Or are you Jude again? I suppose you're always going to be Jude for me, which is a sin of some kind, I'm sure of it, but I'll sit with that until you're Sister Clare and I'm Sister Anne and even the Reverend Mother can find no fault in us. If you'll stay. Will you stay? No, of course you won't. Is it your son?”

Jude nodded. Sat on the bed. Looked at Nathalie.

“Maybe we're neither one of us meant for this. Maybe Sister Mary Catherine was right the first time. She nearly refused me, too, you know. Said I reminded her more of a wild hermit mystic than a Cistercian, but that there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe my mind's too busy to quiet down and make candles only and only pray. To be around people and not talk, it's so hard. We sign to each other around the other sisters, just like they do, that's permitted, and everything I have to say to them I can say with my hands. But there are no hand signs for how much you mean to me. This didn't turn out at all like I
thought it would. I thought a contemplative order would let me hear God better, it was all I wanted. I felt so sure once. Did you feel sure, or were you just hiding here?”

Jude looked at her, the tremors going through her getting smaller.

“You don't know, do you?”

Nathalie sat next to Jude. A bell sounded.

“There's the end of Sext. An hour, you said. An hour isn't enough. I promise I don't talk like this to anyone else, the words just pour out of me when I'm with you. It's your eyes, your sky-colored eyes, I fall into them. I suppose I also fall into the hole that's in your heart, there's such a vacuum there, maybe now you'll find whatever you need to make you heal. Maybe you'll find that it's here after all and come back. Will you at least think about that? Coming back? You wouldn't be the first to leave and then return, though so few leave. It's nice here, after all, away from traffic and wars and the radio, so much noise on the radio. Will you take your sandals? Of course you will, you can't walk out of here barefoot. And your socks, though it's not cold now, only a little at night. Oh, Jude. May I hold you?”

Jude nodded. Nathalie put her thin arms around her friend, rested her head on her shoulder. Sister Columbine walked by, holding a rosary and whispering, glancing once into the door Jude had left blamelessly open. She walked on, still whispering, her face innocent of approval or disapproval. It was Sister Mary Monica and the Reverend Mother who thought these birds nested too closely, but they, too, passed by without comment.

Jude gripped the smaller girl hard now, her boyish hands all but hurting Nathalie's shoulders. Jude kissed her temple once, long, her nose filling with Nathalie's faint scent of garden sweat and black tea. Jude rose from the bed in her work clothes, put on her socks and sandals. She took her habit and rosary in a small handbag. Just before she moved out the door for the last time, she kissed her fingers, then
turned her palm to Nathalie, something between a blown kiss and a kiss of peace. Nathalie sensed that her friend was heading into a profound darkness full of biting and broken bones; that she was going there to stand in the stead of innocents; that she was the closest thing to a saint Nathalie would ever meet; that they would never meet again in person, or, if they did, they would not recognize each other.

The young woman stared at the emptiness where Jude had been. The tears were not long behind, and when they came she would savor them, she would kiss them from her own fingertips. She had no stomach for lunch, not for beets, not for honey, not even for Sister Columbine's cheese and potato casserole.

The hanger that once held Jude's habit still swung gently.

When it was still, Nathalie would let herself cry, but she would shut the door. Her grief was between her and Jude. Or, now that Jude was gone, between her and God. This was what it was to be a cloistered contemplative; to lose everything but God, and to do nothing about it. To be passive as a lamb.

“You're not a lamb at all,” she told the hanger. “You're a wild boar. And someone's going to get the tusk.”

“IT'S BRAVE OF YOU TO TAKE THIS STEP,” THE MAN WHO CALLED HIMSELF WICKLOW
said. Farms drifted by outside the car windows, their soil fertile and sweet on the air that buffeted her through the quartered window. Classical music played over static, Judith wasn't sure what song or composer it was, she didn't know classical music. She had been meaning to correct this since she wept at Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata when her tenth-grade English teacher, Sister Henriette, played it for a roomful of acneous sophomores on a cheap picnic record player. What Beethoven, who was German, or Henriette, a mousy French-Canadian who sounded like a duck, had to do with English class Jude never knew, but she wept at the relentless fall of the piano keys, each note driving at something mute and powerful and sad that grew in the center of her and was perhaps only now flowering. Cows lined up at a sagging wire fence, probing the air with their gentle tongues, calves shouldering into mothers' legs, tails swishing in light that had just matured into something like gold. Now the sun, well behind the speeding car, ducked behind a raft of clouds.

“Are we in Pennsylvania?”

“It's better if you don't ask questions about geography. Try not to look at town names.”

She nodded. He smiled at the road, and she guessed that he was proud of her silence, that he saw strength in it. She wanted to ask why but decided to practice patience. God had taken the reins now. That God existed she had no doubt; her only questions were questions of character.

“They can make you do things. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“They can also make you say things. That's why no one of us should know more than necessary.”

She nodded again.

Her eyes asked a question.

“You know what they are.”

“I do?”

“You just don't want to say the word because it sounds ridiculous.”

The thin one in the Camaro the tall one in the backseat the woman like the whore on the beast's back the teeth on them the eyes that held light like coins on dead eyes quarters quarters quarters the teeth on them could bite holes in cans.

“Evenin', miss.”

They came out after dark like dark brought them like junebugs stupid butting into lights could they help themselves it didn't matter they bit hard they were for smashing she would smash them if she could oh please let this man be real oh please don't fool me anymore like when you said I should be a wife like when you put that baby in my arms when his gums hurt my breast and my nipples turned tough and brown for nothing oh please arm me sanctify me I'll believe what you tell me I'll say that movie-monster word and if you fool me again then stop telling people about Jesus stop the book at Malachi because all you have in your pockets is Passover and the baby on the rock and the knife in Daddy's hand.

She said the word.

He said it too.

She turned the corners of her mouth down and laughed, but she was also crying. He laughed, too. He put his hand on her shoulder and drove like that until he had to shift gears.

—

BY DAY, THE BARN RESEMBLED ANY NUMBER OF BEAT-UP OLD BARNS ONE PASSES
on rural roads without sparing a second glance. A stone foundation and waist-high stone wall gave way to weather-grayed planks that brightened to faint red in a foot-wide band beneath the roof. The trees that once separated the property from a neighboring cabbage farm had been cut, leaving sight lines open for hundreds of yards in each direction. Unremarkable terrain stretched out for miles around the barn, punctuated by a lonely gas station here, a general store there. A fertilizer plant hulked just past the one-stoplight town, making a once-pristine little jewel of a river undrinkable, this despite the prayers of the Amish in the next county. Judith had been nearly asleep when the car approached the barn's gate, the wood of which looked much older than the cross that sat atop it.

A small white house with black trim sat just north of the barn, a cross over each window.

“Welcome to All Souls Ranch,” Wicklow said.

At that, three border collies sprang barking from the shadow of the barn and ran to the gate, followed by one amiable-looking stout man with a silver cross around his neck and a holstered pistol. He walked from the darkness of the barn in no particular hurry, at last squinting into the window of the car. He smiled, betraying missing teeth near the back, and opened the gate. As they drove in, Judith had time to notice that the single strand of rusted barbed wire atop the fence had been hung with tiny bells, all of them painted black.

“You're just in time,” the man shouted after them. “Supper's at seven.”

—

“WE ARE THE BEREAVED,” THE MEN SAID, STANDING AROUND THE RAW PINE TABLE
with their heads bowed, their hands clasped. “We unite in hidden knowledge to act for the good of others. Our works will go unseen. We shall not love our own lives, but shall lay them down in the name of good works.”

“Have you witnessed proof of evil on the earth?” Wicklow said.

“I have,” the stout man said.

“I have,” each man in turn said, four besides Wicklow, starting at his left and going around the circle until they got to Judith, who sat next to him. They looked at her.

“I have,” she said.

Light from the failing sun leaked in between the planks at the barn's west side, throwing stripes of golden sunlight across the floor.

“Have you lost beloved flesh through the machinations of evil?”

“I have,” each man said.

Judith said, “I have.”

“Will you use any means at your disposal to destroy unnatural agents who work evil in the world, and also those who knowingly serve them?”

“I will,” each man said.

and also those who knowingly serve them

Judith paused at the thought of destroying anything other than one of these monsters, meaning
a person
, even if that person served them. This was her first time speaking the creed. Nobody rushed her. She examined the word
knowingly
, found it just reassuring enough. At length, she met Wicklow's gaze and spoke.

“I will.”

She heard her own voice as if from afar.

Did I just promise to kill somebody? Am I really here? Did I die in that
wreck and pass into purgatory? Is anyone praying for me to get me out of here? I cannot believe the course I'm on. I can't turn from it, either.

“Then let us sit thankfully and break bread, as our enemy cannot,” Wicklow said.

Judith remained standing.

I'm in the trunk, Mom.

I'm ready to come out of the trunk.

YOU'RE NOT GLENDON

no

GLENDON'S DEAD

Yes

IT'S JUST ME IN HERE ITS ONLY ME MAKING YOU TALK IN MY HEAD

Yes, Mommy.

“Judith?”

Wicklow's voice.

She opened her eyes.

She smelled vegetables and garlic. An older woman with pillowy bosoms ladled soup from a steaming pot into the mismatched earthenware bowls that sat before everyone's place. The others looked up at her where she stood sweating.

“Judith, do you require assistance?”

“No,” she said, and sat at her place.

This isn't purgatory. I'm nuts. I'm finally losing my mind. Maybe I lost it before and Robert and Glen are living at the house without me because I'm in the nuthouse and none of this happened.

Except that it did.

She took a spoonful of soup and held it, inventoried it. Tomato and chicken broth with carrots and potatoes and onion. Threads of meat; the soup was thick with threads of canned corned beef. She looked again at the faces as six mouths opened around spoons or chewed or
got wiped by napkins. Wicklow, intense and certain, like some killing clergyman, some armed prophet doing God's dirty work. She looked at the eyes of these men.

If I am nuts, I'm at the right table.

She took the spoonful of food and ate.

“We await one more,” Wicklow said. “Upon his arrival, tomorrow, we begin preparing, and we must prepare in earnest. Bram Stoker, quoting the poem ‘Lenore,' said, ‘The dead ride quickly.' That has never been more true than now. When that phone rings,” he said, pointing at a wall-mounted telephone that looked quite out of place in the barn, “in whatever state of readiness we find ourselves, we act.”

“Who's on the other end of that phone?” Jude said before she could stop herself.

Wicklow smiled pleasantly at her, and, in a disarmingly mild tone, said, “You will never ask me that question again.”

—

NIGHT.

My name is not Wicklow, but it is the only name I have now. When you speak to the others, do not ask them their last names, do not tell them yours. I would not want members of your family to come to harm because another is taken. This is not a request.

That was one of the first rules Wicklow had taught her while they drove.

Breaking that rule was also one of the first things the stout man from the gate did when they sat down to talk on the back step. He and Judith were the last two who had not retired to the house.

“My name's Pete, but everyone calls me ‘Lettuce.' I picked that up in the air force. Airman ‘Lettuce' Pettis. Don't tell me your last name, I don't want to know. I only told you mine because my family's gone,
so they can't go looking for anybody if they get you. Not that they'll get you.”

“I would have been okay with Pete.”

“Yeah, but I answer better to Lettuce. Or Pettis. But I didn't want you to think I was named for actual lettuce. Nothing exciting about lettuce. Not that I'm trying to excite you, it's not like that. Sorry, I always talk too much around pretty girls. You make me nervous. Pretty girls, I mean. You really a nun?”

“A novice, yes.”

“Is that a special kind of nun?”

“It's a new nun. A temporary nun.”

“Like on probation?”

“No, that's a postulant. Being a novice is more like leasing before you buy.”

“Gotcha.”

Lettuce took a drink from a small flask, and the smell of whiskey rose in the air.

“You don't seem like the type, or I'd offer,” he said. “But you just sing out if you do want a nip.”

“I thought we weren't supposed to do that.”

“I can't sleep without a little. I don't need much, just a bit to take the edge off. He knows. It's really more of a suggestion than a rule. Least for me. I been with him the second longest. After Hank.”

“How long's that?”

“Two years. When I say with him, I don't mean physically with him. You go home. He calls. It's like that. I've probably only spent thirty or forty days with him altogether, and not all at once.”

She processed that for a moment. Pinched her hand like a claw to ask for the whiskey flask, took just a capful of its bright warmth into her mouth and swallowed.

“So, none of you are very experienced at this?”

“I guess you could say we're all
novices
.”

She smiled. A question wormed its way into her mouth.

“Have you ever . . .”

He watched her, pretty sure what she was asking but waiting anyway.

“Destroyed one?” she said at last.

“No.”

“Oh,” she said.

“He has, though.”

“I certainly hope he has.”

“He has,” Lettuce said. “Not here.”

“Where?”

“Cuba.”