The Suicide Motor Club (4 page)

THE DREAM WOKE HER. SHE GASPED. SHE LIFTED HER HEAD FROM THE PILLOW
she had wet with drool and looked around her room. Morning's first light bled in through the curtains, just too bright for her to blame the streetlamps. She found herself bunched up to one side of the bed as though she still had to share it with her husband, but he was three weeks in a box. Her T-shirt clung to her here and there where she had broken out in a night sweat, but she heard the fan on the dresser and felt it cooling her. The dream had made her sweat.

A man had been in her bed, but it wasn't Robert. Then the same man had been hitchhiking, but it wasn't the black man who pulled her out of the car. It was a dead man, long dead, his skin fish-belly pale and an almost pleasant stink on him like faraway skunk. But when he opened his mouth, fireflies came out. What was he doing in her bed? Was that why she had pushed herself over to one side, to give this corpse room to lie with her? Perhaps they had been speaking. It didn't seem to have been a sexual dream, but she couldn't reason out what had made her sweat. It had all the ingredients of a nightmare, but something about it made her feel . . . what? Alive, perhaps. Whatever had passed between them, he had gone out the window and started walking away from her toward the highway with his thumb out. His
fireflies went with him and left her in darkness so profound and hopeless that she gasped.

Judith went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. The face that stared back at her struck her as some relative's face, an older cousin's face. The stitches were out, but the scar traversing her nose and cheek still looked pink and raw, like a slash of war paint in a bad western. She wouldn't be doing any face cream commercials soon. Or ever. But she wasn't hideous. Her mother would be glad of that, at least. Her mother worshipped at the church of grandchildren and even now, even with Glendon barely cold, if cold he was,

I'm in the trunk, Mom! I'm in the trunk but there's no rush.

the old woman would already be sizing up Judith like a brood mare. It made her want to march down to the hospital and demand a hysterectomy. She missed Glen too much for another infant, even a hypothetical baby ten years out, to seem like anything but a reptile posing as a child. She had been grateful when he stopped screaming so much and learned to sleep the night through, but now she would do anything to hear that high, rattling scream, so particular to him. So different from any other infant's.

“Stop it,” she told herself, and squinted away the tears that wanted to come.

She thought about going back to sleep to finish that odd dream, but she didn't think it would return. She feared sleep would bring another crash nightmare, the variations of which were like various tentacles of the same malign octopus: Sometimes she rode in the backseat of a driverless car just beginning to careen out of control, unable to get to the steering wheel before it gained speed and smashed a guardrail, or wandered across the line into the grilles and headlights of oncoming traffic, and she woke shouting. Sometimes she cradled
Glendon in her lap while the Falcon teetered on the edge of a mountain pass or a bridge, and the boy crawled away from her and out the window; when she went after him, her shifting weight made the car fall, and it rolled while it fell, and she woke shouting. Sometimes Robert drove them slowly through a crowd of people with shining eyes like cat's eyes staring in at her because they knew her husband was a liar, and when she asked him what he was lying about, he floored the pedal and smashed the car into the crowd and arms came off and heads knocked the windshield and she knew the brains inside those heads would swell and she woke shouting.

These were ordinary nightmares, she knew, common to victims of trauma. Nothing to fear, just some nocturnal yelling. Now that she was alone in the big empty Craftsman on Coventry Street, she could shout to her heart's content. She considered shouting now, at her own scarred face in the mirror, just to prove she could. She even took a sharp breath in.

She let the breath out.

“You're going off your rocker,” she told her face, and the face didn't disagree.

She wanted to go back to bed and dream of the dead man with a mouth full of fireflies, but she knew she would dream of crashing.

She knew she would dream of shining eyes.

Too dark in here, even with the sun inching closer.

She didn't like the dark anymore.

im in the dark now mom but i dont mind the dark or the cold because nothing can hurt me in the trunk lets both get in the trunk and not be hurt

“Stop it!” she told the voice, not really Glendon's voice, she knew, but some part of her own brain that wanted to torment her. Or maybe
it was something worse—maybe her mother was right. Janet Eberhart really believed in the devil, devils in plural, and angels, and she hadn't been sure she believed in devils, but now.

Oh, but now.

Judith turned all the lights on in the house.

She put coffee on and sat at the dining room table, glad for the sound of its percolation. She knew she shouldn't look at the kitchen clock because she wasn't going to like what it said, but of course she looked almost immediately.

Five forty.

Even when she had a husband and child, the house would have been still now. She used to cherish the mornings she woke up first, how precious that hour or half hour of silence had been. At six thirty Robert's alarm would have gone off and he would have started the gruff industry of morning. Glen would have woken up when he heard the bell on Dad's Westclox, and even though he liked to wallow in bed and play with this or that toy under the sheets as if in a tent, he would have tromped downstairs by seven in his footie PJs, mad for cereal. Maybe if she listened hard enough she would hear his feet, just the sound of them, not a ghost precisely but a crack in this false, still new world the accident had made. If she heard that sound and believed hard enough, maybe the actual boy would knit himself up from the ankles, hop into the kitchen like a bunny, and drag a chair across the linoleum so he could reach the cupboard and, on the bottom shelf, his bowl with cowboys on it.

She folded her hands under her nose and talked into them, saying, “Just take it back, I won't tell anybody you changed your mind so they'll expect it too. Just take it back and it'll be our secret and I'll do anything you want. I can find that paramedic's church and turn Protestant, I can even forgive Robert if you just do this for me please please please.”

She turned off the coffee urn so she could hear better and she bent her head and listened for Glendon but all she heard was birds, and after half an hour she was starting to hate the birds, so she turned the coffee back on.

—

“I HAD A WEIRD DREAM THIS MORNING, MOM, LIKE A FEVER DREAM,” JUDITH SAID.

“Did you sweat?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn't about lemons, I hope.”

“Not lemons.”

The two women were boxing the last of Robert's clothes for the church thrift store. His side of the closet was empty now, and the same was true of the medicine cabinet and the pantry and the refrigerator. Neither Jude's father nor mother dared suggest she should start paring down Glen's things; it had only been a month. Nobody in authority held out any hope the boy might be recovered, but Judith kept staring at children on the street who resembled her son in any way. Once she had seen a boy with little red pants just like Glendon's and she followed that boy into the library, so full of mad hope she made a soft squeal in the back of her throat. She knew good and well those pants were in Glen's drawer because she had washed and folded them for the third time that morning, but when the library boy turned around with the wrong face, the strength of her anger and betrayal astonished her. She turned on her heel and marched herself out the front door before she could slap the strange boy—she wouldn't have stopped slapping him until somebody pulled her off, or until he did what she wanted and turned into Glendon.

box my clothes up too mom im a big boy like daddy i wanted to be just like him and now i am

STOP IT!

“Do you have a fever?”

“I don't think so.”

“Let me feel your forehead.”

Judith obliged her.

“No, you're not warm.”

Judith's mom looked at her with wary eyes; she remembered the night sweats that came on when Jude turned thirteen and started her monthlies, and she remembered the dreams that came with them.

In June of her fourteenth year, she had awakened her parents sleepwalking. Her top had been soaked. When her father asked her what she was doing, she had said she didn't want to go to “Lemons” because “Lemons” wasn't safe. They burned cars and threw them at people and they died. Although she didn't remember the conversation, parts of the dream had stuck with her. Her dad had asked her who told her Lemons wasn't safe, but nobody told her—she had seen a lettered sign, and a flying car, and fire. Days later, the worst auto racing accident in history took place at Le Mans when a hurtling car struck the barrier separating the crowd from the track and somersaulted over, burning and beheading scores of spectators.

Mom's face sagged as she thought about the echo here, how another layer of coincidence had been piled on to that distant event by circumstance. Judith the girl had dreamed not only about an event taking place later that week, but also about the way Judith the woman was destined to lose her family. Had God really shown a child a glimpse of the awful turn her life was going to take and given her no chance to escape it? It was all too much. She folded a shirt.

“I have to get out of here, Mom.”

“I think that's probably a good idea. You should come back to California.”

“I don't know what I'd do there.”

“You could still test for the post office. In Fresno. Weren't you going to do that anyway now that . . .”

She swallowed the words
Glen's in school
but Jude heard them anyway.

“They're giving all those jobs to vets.”

“Not all of them. And you'll test really high, I know you will. They pay.”

“I don't think I can just go to California like nothing ever happened.”

“What will you do here? There's nothing holding you to Ohio now. Just his people, and his people are . . .”

Judith wasn't sure if the next word was going to be
untrustworthy
or
cold
, but she couldn't have argued with either one.

“There's something I'm thinking of.”

“Surely you see that coming home is natural. In these circumstances.”

“No, Mom, listen to me. I just have to get out of here, and Fresno's not going to help. At least I don't think so. I need . . . I just have a big hole where my heart was. Everything's falling into it.”

Mom taped the box shut, but her hands were shaking and she stuck the tape to itself. “Oh shucks,” she said. “Now I've done it.”

Judith helped her separate the tape.

“Where will you go?”

“Someplace I guess I never thought about. But I just want to see.”

“Can you tell me?”

“You'll laugh.”

“I think my laugher's busted for a good while.”

“Anyway, I just want to see.”

“Where, Jude?”

“Here,” she said, getting to her feet in a fluid way the older woman
simultaneously envied and felt guilty for envying. She came back with a paper triptych showing a medieval-looking woman holding a flower.

“It's just for a weekend. Just to see what it's all about.”

Her mother unfolded the brochure, looked at it, then folded it back. She gave Judith a dubious look.

She only said one word.

“You?”

“A LOT OF YOUNG WOMEN SIT IN THAT CHAIR ONCE. ABOUT HALF OF THEM SIT IN IT
twice. Very few come back for a third interview.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

Judith had to struggle to look at the older woman's eyes. However kind they were, they were also hard. They were the eyes of a woman who had been disappointed innumerable times, and knew you were likely to do it to her, too. They were eyes that withheld their true sparkle for those who surprised her.

“I hope I do, Mother Superior.”

The older woman nodded. Judith had the impression she was pleased to hear a measured answer. She noticed for the first time that she sat higher than the nun with whom she spoke. The older woman had intentionally chosen a lower chair for herself than that her guests sat upon.

“You don't owe us anything, you know.”

“I feel I do.”

“Nonsense. Helping others is our chief calling, and there is no question in my mind that you needed help. Help we were uniquely qualified to give you. It was our duty to shelter you from the world
that has been so very . . . brisk with you. It is why we have a guest house in the first place.”

“I was able to sleep here. You quieted my mind.”

“It was not us who gave you rest, but him we serve.”

“Then I thank you for being . . . his instrument.”

“The pause is telling.”

“I'm sorry.”

“The pause is not significant because you doubt. Everyone doubts, even our Lord at Gethsemane. Rather, it tells me you are honest. You pause because you want to make sure you mean what you say. That is a virtue.”

Judith looked again at a large charcoal sketch of St. Peter's Basilica that hung in a simple frame on the wall opposite the window. It was a good sketch, earnest if not sophisticated. Something seemed important to her about that drawing, and she couldn't say why. Her mind went to a drawing Glen had made of their church; in it, the cross on top had migrated to the side, stuck jauntily out. He had made marks that looked like chicken feet to represent the roof tiles, and that struck her as rather advanced. Had her pride caused them all to be punished? Were her pride and Robert's transgression enough to cause God to withdraw the gift he had given them?

You're being ridiculous

She realized then that she had been spoken to and was expected to respond.

“Pardon me, Mother Superior?”

“Are you quite well?”

“Yes, I'm fine.”

She blinked, looked deliberately away from the drawing.

“Vatican Two. I was fortunate enough to be sent with a group representing the American Order of Cistercians of the Common Observance. I saw His Holiness in person and even got to practice my Italian
on an archbishop. Over cappuccino. I know that smacks of pride, but it was a very pleasant interlude. I think God gives us foretastes of the pleasures awaiting the faithful, and that we honor him by recognizing them as such and then going back to hard work and poverty. It's the going back that trips up so many of us.”

“Yes, Mother Superior.”

All this Mother Superior business, as if the younger woman were already a postulant.

“Judith.”

“Yes?”

The woman leaned closer, spearing Jude with those eyes that missed so little.

“I meant what I said about you not owing us. I understand that you feel gratitude toward us, but make no mistake; the course you are proposing is nothing short of marriage. To Christ. And gratitude is a poor reason to marry anyone.”

“It's more than that.”

“You're quite sure, are you?”

Judith pinched her left finger, felt where her wedding ring used to sit.

“Yes.”

“There it is. That refreshingly honest pause again.”

“I'm sure.”

“I think you very much want to be sure. But I'm not convinced you are, and I must be before I go further with your application.”

Judith looked down.

The Mother Superior gently raised Judith's chin so their eyes met again, then sat back.

“I think you mistake affection for vocation. Our order is in some peril. Our numbers are flagging, hence the brochures. The retreats. The average age here is 58.4, I worked it out on my calculator. Oh, we
get applicants, not in droves, but we get them. Modern life makes so many of us strangely empty. Yet, of the several girls who have presented themselves to us this year, you are one of only two I would seriously consider. There are other sisters in positions of authority who want me to accept anyone who isn't promiscuous or violent. But I would rather see us close our doors than harm young women by setting them up for failure.”

“I won't fail, Mother Superior.”

The woman seemed to chew the inside of her cheek.

“You could simply be our friend, you know. Buy our candles. Come to stay for a weekend once a year. Write us letters or send us Christmas cards, we very much like Christmas cards, especially Sister Agatha, who just had her cataracts removed in Dayton. My point is that you are a woman of the world. You have had the blessings of family, which is, despite what some of the sisters tell themselves, just as pleasing to the Lord as a life of contemplation and prayer. Yes, those blessings were taken from you, quite savagely, but, once you do the hard work of grieving, you will still be young enough to . . .”

Judith took a shallow in-breath and held it.

“There.”

The Mother Superior pointed at her.

“You wanted to interrupt me because I was about to say something ignorant and presumptuous, something it wasn't my place to say. You would have been within your rights to interrupt, but you checked yourself. Your natural honesty is tempered with the good manners so often missing in girls your age. I like you, Judith. I don't think you're right for us, not yet, or rather I don't think we're right for
you
, however much moments like that make me doubt myself. We'll talk about your application, and pray on it. But I tell you candidly that I think joining our order now will do you great injury.”