What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (2 page)

The stairs down to the basement are gloomy; they always make me think a nun is going to pop out at me wearing one of those old-fashioned habits, or some ancient padre from the colonial days will dodder past, speaking Spanish, but there’s never anyone down there. As I reached the bottom step, I saw St. Felix in the light from the one little high-up window. He looked tired, and kind of gloomy too. Whatever he was wearing looked like the mice had gnawed it, and it was more faded than ever. I felt around for the light switch and turned it on. St. Felix looked back at me and scratched his beard, and I screamed.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Who are you?” I backed away.

“Felix.” He pointed at his feet. “It’s on my pedestal.”

I stared at him. I could have sworn it
was
St. Felix. He had on this sort of white bathrobe thing, and sandals—Birkenstocks, I think. His hair was gray and sort of shaggy like Felix’s. And he stepped down off St. Felix’s pedestal, and there wasn’t anybody else on there.

“There’s all kinds of people upstairs,” I said. “People come down here all the time.”

“No, they don’t,” he said. “But I’m not gonna hurt you. Are you still fighting with your mom over the divorce?”

“How do you know that?” I demanded.

He looked hurt. “What? You think we don’t pay attention to people who pray to us? It’s not like I have lots of people down here, lighting candles and gilding my halo.”

“You don’t have a halo,” I told him.

He felt around in the air over his head as if it had just gone missing. “Hmmm. I expect they don’t manifest well.”

I knew I was probably trapped in the basement of St. Thomas’s with a lunatic, but where had the statue gone? “You aren’t St. Felix,” I told him.

“I’ll prove it.” He sat down on a wooden box labeled N
ATIVITY, ODD PIECES.
“For starters,” he said, “do
not
hang around with that Michalski boy. All that fifteen-year-old boys have on their minds is getting in some girl’s underwear.”

I could feel my face going hot. It’s one thing to tell something like that to a statue; it’s another to have the statue turn into a live actual man.

“Second, your mom is divorcing your stepdad and you don’t like that. And, three, you got
nice
hair.”

Oh, God. I remembered telling him when I got my first period. He was a
statue
. Then.

It was halfway a relief when it occurred to me that all the things he was talking about were stuff I’d told him recently. “If you’re St. Felix, what’s my father’s name? Not Ben, my real father.”

My mother gets married and divorced when she hasn’t got anything else to do. She married her first husband, whose name I don’t even know, when she was sixteen, but her parents had it annulled. Lots later she married my father in a nuptial Mass, which didn’t work any better than the Las Vegas wedding had because all Mom got out of that marriage was me.

“Gil Arnaz,” Felix said.

I tried to remember the last time I had talked about Gil Arnaz. It
might
have been while I was talking about the divorce. I edged past him to look around the broom closet door, which was standing half open. A ratty old blanket and a backpack were on the floor with an empty can of spaghetti. There was probably enough room to sleep in there if you took out all the old mop buckets and moth-eaten cassocks, which somebody had done.

“You’ve been listening to me!” I said.

“Well, sure. You’ve been talking to me.”

“I’ve been talking to St. Felix!”

He smiled. His teeth were snaggly. “It was nice. Nobody else has talked to me in a long time.”

“You’re not St. Felix!”

He pointed a finger at me. “If I’m not, then where is he?”

“If you are, how come you’re suddenly alive?”

He looked like he was actually trying to figure that out. “I guess God finally decided I wasn’t a saint.”

I rolled my eyes.

“On the other hand,” he said kind of thoughtfully, “it gets real hard to be a saint when somebody’s trying to kill you. I think God was expecting too much. What do you think?”

“I think if Father Weatherford catches you down here, he’ll call the police.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

I absolutely did not believe this man was St. Felix. And in any case, nobody ever tried to kill St. Felix of Valois, who led a very boring life at his monastery—although he once found the Blessed Virgin and her angels in the chapel ringing the bells for him when he overslept.

“I can ask God to change your mom’s mind about the divorce,” the guy said. “I don’t think he actually listens to me, but if you want me to, I’ll ask.”

I pictured myself telling Father Weatherford about him. I’d have to explain about the statue being gone and why I’d been coming down here and I’d sound like those people who see the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich. Before I could make up my mind, I heard someone walking around upstairs in the chapel, which has a tile floor. I ran up the stairs and out the side door, and left St. Felix to fend for himself.

Mom was gone by the time I got back. Grandma Alice and Ben were in the kitchen scraping plates and giving bites off their forks to the Todal, who is a giant dog named for the monster in
The Thirteen Clocks
, which was Mom’s favorite book when she was little. The Todal was the size of a calf when we got him, when he was ten weeks old. No one knows exactly what he is. He leaned against Ben, looking soulful and hoping for the rest of my potato.

“The coast is clear,” Ben said. “Where’d you disappear to?”

“Just out for a walk.” I didn’t feel up to telling anyone about the guy in the church basement. Mom would freak if she knew, and want me to carry mace, and Ben would probably call the cops. I didn’t think the guy was dangerous, though. I know that’s stupid, to assume some random man who’s been sleeping in the church basement and claims he’s a saint is harmless, but I did anyway. I’ll probably be abducted by aliens before I’m twenty.

Ben was watching me, looking worried. He’s more worried about me than he is about Mom, I think. It drives me crazy that he’s so casual about her leaving—does he
want
her to divorce him?

“Have you started getting your stuff for school together?” he asked, reminding me that there’s less than a month of summer vacation left, a dismal thought. “Backpack and everything? Do you need new clothes? Do we need to shop?”

“Have you considered the possibility that Sylvia will go ape if you take Angie shopping?” Grandma Alice asked him.

“I can take myself,” I said. “I can take the bus to Ventura.” Ayala only has one department store, where you can buy things that look like they came out of the
Farmer’s Almanac
. I absolutely did not want to go shopping with Mom, and I couldn’t picture Ben hanging around the Juniors section in Macy’s.

Ben frowned at the bus idea.

“I can go with Lily,” I said. “She just got her license.” Lily is my best friend.

“Does Lily have a car?”

“We can take her dad’s.” I slid out of the kitchen and into my room, hitting Lily’s number on my cell. I had it on silent, and I’d stacked up five missed calls from Mom since dinner.

“People get very strange over custody issues,” Lily said seriously when she picked me up the next day in her parents’ old Volvo.

“It’s not as if Ben could get custody,” I grumbled. “She’s just freaking because I won’t talk to her.”

“You’d be freaking if she wouldn’t talk to you,” Lily pointed out.

What I like about Lily is that she takes everything seriously, even though she can be a goof. She never tells me I shouldn’t do something, she just makes what she calls “suggestions,” and when I do it and it turns out to have been a disaster, she never says she told me so. She also has absolutely straight blond hair that she winds up into a knot and sticks a pencil through, and it stays. I don’t know how. Mine is a mess of curls and it still won’t do the pencil thing. Lily is sixteen already, but she’s in tenth grade with me because her parents lived in a monastery in Nepal until she was seven and they just never got around to putting her in school there. They’re a little casual that way. Her family moved to Ayala when we were in middle school and we’re both such weirdos that we were destined to be friends. Neither of us has any clue how to deal with people our own age since we’re both only children and were raised by wolves. Arty, intellectual wolves.

“Ben gave me his credit card,” I told Lily. “I don’t think it’s even an account that Mom’s on. That’ll make her mad, too.”

“Are you trying to make her mad?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Constructive.” Lily swung the Volvo around the corner.

When she stopped for the light by the post office, I saw him. It was St. Felix of whoever-he-was. He was walking from St. Thomas’s toward the Spanish-style arcade that runs through Ayala’s one-block shopping district. He was still wearing that old bathrobe thing, but I could see he had jeans on under it.

I poked Lily. “Who’s that?”

“Someone who’s not taking his medication?” she suggested.

We watched him go past the drug store, the bathrobe flapping around his legs. Lily turned the Volvo left and forgot about him, but I craned my neck around to see if I could see where he went.

We spent the afternoon trying on clothes and counting up how many people we know whose parents are divorced, which was depressing.

“Okay, count how many aren’t,” Lily said, inspecting a pair of khakis in the three-way mirror.

“Yours aren’t. That’s one.” I pulled a too-tight shirt back over my head. I have Mom’s shape, which is top-heavy. Tank tops that look great on Lily, who is thin and ethereal, make me look like a hooker. On the other hand, I have good legs and a perpetual, non-cancer-inducing tan. I piled my hair up on my head to see what it would look like and decided it made me look like Chiquita Banana.

“Yours aren’t yet,” Lily said firmly. “You have to figure out
why
she wants a divorce. Then you’ll know what you’re up against.”

“She doesn’t have a reason,” I said. “As far as I can tell.”

“Trust me. She does.”

“There’s got to be something I can do. If I was in a sitcom, I would. Courageous, sensible teen shows parents the light.”

“There’s a philosophy for you—TV as a guide to life.”

“Or I could consult a psychic.” That would work about as well as anything else I’ve tried so far.

Lily took my hand and stared at my palm. She crossed her eyes. “I see tall dark stranger, many lovers, career in moving peectures,” she said in a really horrible accent.

“For Mom? That’s what I’m trying to prevent.”

“No. For you. Take mind off. Also ice cream.”

A double-cherry/coffee ice-cream-cone fix only lasts thirty minutes, but it’s great while it’s working. I also swear I saw Felix again, with a cone in his hand, while Lily was backing the car around.

2

It’s a lot harder to think someone away than it is to think them up. I avoided St. Thomas’s, even on Sunday, but after that night I started seeing St. Felix everywhere. I saw him in the park at Bowlful of Blues, talking to a woman selling batik jackets. I saw him at Domenico’s Pizza washing out garbage cans. I saw him in Safeway buying cigarettes. Each time, he smiled at me but didn’t say anything. He was always wearing his old white bathrobe over jeans and a T-shirt. Nobody ever seemed to say anything about that.

On the other hand, Ayala is used to practically anything. The Theosophists started a foundation here in the 1930s and they imported peacocks that run wild all over the East End now. All kinds of Hollywood people live here—big celebrities, not just people like Ben, who’s a screenwriter. Mostly we’re polite and pretend we don’t recognize them. Plus there are all the tourists and the acupuncturists and aromatherapy shops and pet psychologists. So, given all that, maybe a guy in a bathrobe isn’t worth commenting on.

The time I saw him in Safeway, I almost gave him the no-smoking lecture, since he’d already butted into
my
life. Maybe he could tell—he smiled again and slid behind a shelf of soup, and I didn’t see him again for a few days. I even began to wonder if I was nuts and he really didn’t exist, especially when I mentioned him to Lily and she didn’t remember him. Then, just when I thought he was a figment of my imagination, I saw him having coffee with my mom.

They were at Bert’s Used Books, under a eucalyptus tree at a table by the cash register. Bert keeps everything except the best books on outdoor shelves, with little fiberglass roofs over them in case it rains, which it hardly ever does. The guy had his robe on, and his backpack was under the table by his feet. He was talking, waving his hands around, and Mom was listening, her fingers under her chin and a little smile on her mouth.

I just stood there between the science fiction and the mysteries and gaped at them, and then I took off before they saw me.