Future Home of the Living God(51)

“There was this man,” says Orielee, “who was helping lots of women hide, I guess, and they got him. I think I heard they followed him to where you live. So he was helping you, too, right? It’s okay, understandable really, it was just his belief, you know, to hide the women. But they got lots of names from this guy.” Her eyes are round, very round, and her mouth makes a little o before she says, “Because they can do that, you know, with their persuading methodologies. Everybody talks.”



October 15

Last night, I picked apart an entire blanket and saved it carefully and stayed up weaving through the long hours until dawn. Tears leaked out of my eyes as I worked. My fingers started to chafe and bleed. Spider Nun finally took the rope from my hand. The adrenaline wore off and I collapsed. I slept all of this morning and tried to continue sleeping on into the silence of my heart. But I am awake. There is nothing but Phil’s face and my face and Phil’s hand and my hand and Phil’s heart and my heart and the old, old, words What have they done to you? I open Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.

In this thought, at last, I find a scrap of comfort. I have always believed in a tortured god from reading Catholic history because I know this: there is nothing that one human being will not do to another. We need a god who sides with the wretched. One willing to share misery. I keep on winding, and weaving; my rope twists in my hands. It is near lunchtime and I put my ball of yarn beneath the covers. I compose myself and wait. Spider Nun waits, too, consulting her watch. Soon enough, we hear the rattle of the lunch cart, the tiers of plastic trays bearing sludge, and we pretend to be asleep. The door opens. I look up. When I see who holds the lunch tray my brain skips. Sera sets the tray on my bedside table and cautions me with a look, but she can’t help it, either. Can’t help being suddenly overcome.

I put my hands over my mouth, but tears start up in my eyes and I cry out, muffled, “Mom.” Sera looks at Spider Nun.

“She’s okay.”

“I don’t have much time.” Sera wipes at her face, fiercely whispers. “Look, I’ll be here tomorrow. I’m with Jessie. Don’t try and talk to her though.”

“Where’s Dad? Where’s Phil?”

“Your dad’s okay. . . .” She hesitates.

“Phil?”

“We don’t know.”

“Get us blankets, Mom.” I pull back the covers and show her a glimpse of the woven rope. “Have Jessie get us blankets. Our rope is nearly long enough. We need help getting out though. Somebody’s got to help us break a window.”

The other food delivery woman sticks her head in the room.

“C’mon!”

“Okay,” says Sera, loudly, grinning at us. “This is going to make it easier,” she whispers. She’s amazed at our work and I am as proud as a preschooler. She turns away, and I’m swept through with such a sense of desperate love I can hardly help from crying out, begging her to stay with me. Her silver fairy hair is caught up in a net. She has lost weight, she is angular. She turns to glance at me over her shoulder and I see that she has her capable face on, the face she wore on my two emergency-room visits, the face of packing the car for a vacation, the face I saw during Glen’s idiotic affair, the face of Thanksgiving dinner preparations for thirty people and the face of teacher’s conferences. It is the face that got me into college and the face that got Glen out of jail after many an arrest during protests. The face of I’ll take care of it. The face of failure is not an option. The face of the household general. I breathe a long, deep sigh and eat every bit of my lunch.



October 16

Two orderlies walk me down to ultrasound again. The same attendants are always there. They treat me with great kindness, impersonal serenity, but no matter how hard I beg they will not let me see you. They will not turn my pallet, or bed, to the screen.

“No, darling, no, hush now.” They stroke my hair and fuss with my threadbare bare-ass hospital gown. They are used to women pleading with them, I suppose.

“How far along?” I say. “Healthy? Boy or girl?”

“Healthy, oh, very,” says the brown-haired woman. But she will not let me know how far along your body has progressed, how big or small you are, how close to what they call viable. Afterward, I try to question Orielee.

“Tell me. Please. I know it’s on the chart,” I say, but on this she is adamant. She won’t even give me a hint.

“I’d lose my job and probably my clearance,” she says. “Give me a break.” She also says that she is sorry and that she’d want to know, too, but at least she doesn’t take Spider Nun’s blood.

“I’ll make up some excuse.”

Spider Nun nods at me in relief as she rolls the sleeve of her hospital robe back down. Her eyes are deep with meaning. She keeps staring at me. I know that she wants to speak—but maybe she really is voiceless and hasn’t the power. We now have nearly thirty-two feet of rope, and it is very difficult to hide. It is so chancy, now, that we won’t dare work on it except in the darkest and quietest hours of the night. So we’ll get less done. Today we pick apart as much as we can, and wind the yarn. Our hands are a problem, cracked and raw, dry from the hospital air and we use up all the hand lotion they give us. We don’t want to raise suspicion by asking for more. But even worse than lotion I miss lip balm. I remember the days when I had three or four tubes going at a time. On my desk, in my pocket, in my purse. My lips are so parched I can’t take it anymore. I go out on my usual walk and loiter near the front desk until Jessie sweeps out from the interior back office with a pile of charts. I shouldn’t bother her, it’s dangerous, but I can’t help myself.