Fearful Symmetries (13 page)

Like hell. Everyone knew whose father had really put on that freak show and that most certainly wasn’t the end. There was
lots
more.

Good thing you’ll be a hundred miles away at UMass next year
, said a voice in my mind.
Aren’t things like this why you don’t want to stay here a second longer than you have to?

Yeah, but that wouldn’t help my mother. And I still had two more weeks of school to get through.

I opened my mouth to tell her I wanted to stay home and I’d be skipping graduation, too. But what I heard myself say was, “I’ll go. We’re supposed to pick up our commencement gowns.”

She told me then what the police had told her. He’d been working at the MACC for almost a year, my drunken father. Trying to stay sober, with the intention of suddenly presenting himself to us as a new man, worthy of a family. And while he’d been trying, he’d confided in some of his co-workers, who had confided in their own friends and so on and so forth. By the time Joyce had decided to go to the prom with Tom Clement, it was starting to get around the old home town.

That day after school, the Saturday we’d gone to LaFleur, both Joyce and I thought everyone had been staring at her when in fact it had been me.

“Still want to go in tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said.

For a long moment, my mother’s face was expressionless. Then her mouth turned up in a smile. “Tough cookie, aren’t you?” she said.

“From a long line of tough cookies,” I replied.

I wasn’t surprised when Joyce didn’t show up on Monday, although I thought that was actually her parents’ idea. Even if she couldn’t get her bandaged arm into her the sleeve of her blazer, I didn’t think she’d have been all
that
self-conscious about it.
Take a picture
, she’d have said to anyone who stared,
it’ll last longer
.

And what would she say to anyone who stared at me? For that matter, what would she say
to
me? Probably not
Close your mouth before something flies in
.

I didn’t see Tom Clement until lunchtime. Kate and Mary were at our usual table. I pretended not to see them as I marched over to where Tom always sat alone. He was saying grace in silence, head bowed and eyes closed, but when he finished and looked up, he didn’t seem surprised to find me sitting across from him.

“How’s your neck?” I asked him. The mark from my drunken father’s thumb was even more lurid now.

“It’s fine, thank you.” His voice was still a little raspy.

“Everybody knows that wasn’t your father,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“I know.” He gave a small cough. “And I know whose father it really was, in case you’re wondering. I’ll pray for him. And for you and your mother.”

“That works?”

He opened the milk carton on his tray, his long, slender fingers working expertly. “If you’re asking me does God hear, yes.” He put a straw in the spout and took a long sip.

I waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, I shrugged. “I don’t even know why I came over here.”

He paused with a forkful of creamed potatoes halfway to his mouth. “It was the good luck charm.”

“The what?” I blinked at him.

He held up a finger while he finished chewing. “The good luck charm. You know, the little gold crucifix.” His tenor rasp was matter-of-fact. “Joyce told me she gave it to you.”

I shook my head, wondering how I’d missed the turn-off from pious to crazy. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Again, the we’ve-got-a-secret smile. “I wasn’t sure it would work on Joyce. She isn’t like you and me, you see. She’s practically immune. Saturday night was rough on her but in a month, two months, it’ll be like a bad dream.” His smile widened. “Not you. You’re gonna feel it for a very, very long time. And when it’s time for your kids to go their own prom, it’ll come flooding back like it was yesterday.”

“What are you
talking
about?” I demanded.

“Suffering.” He gazed at me with what I guess was supposed to be saintly compassion; I thought he just looked deranged. “Our Lord suffered to save us and re-open heaven after God the Father locked us out. So we must suffer in this life to repay him.” His face turned sad. “But not everyone suffers, which means others have to suffer for them as well as for themselves. I have done that. And now you have, too.”

I was vaguely aware of kids walking past us, taking their trays to the kitchen conveyor belt. It was almost time to go back to classes but the revelation of Tom Clement’s lunacy eclipsed everything else.

“It’s nothing compared to what
He
endured on the cross,” Tom was saying. “I can stand some discomfort for the Father Who gave me life and the Son Who saved me. But I am only one person—one little, insignificant person. However much I suffer, it isn’t enough. I prayed to God to show me how to give Him more. And He did.

“Just before sophomore year, I was at church and a couple of ladies were helping me find things I could wear from the donation box. I came across this paper bag full of little tiny gold crucifixes, hundreds of them. Someone had dumped them in with the clothes. I asked if I could have one or two and they said I could have the whole bag if I wanted because they really didn’t know what else to do with them. I didn’t know what to do with them either but I took them anyway. The next time I went to confession, I got the monsignor to bless them. As soon as he did, it was like the Holy Spirit came into me and I knew what I was supposed to do.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “I don’t mean weird, I mean genuine locked-ward insane.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t get it right at first. The ones I gave them to—slipped into a pocket or through the vent in a locker door—they were all people
I
thought should suffer. But they didn’t. Then I realized—my mistake was thinking
I
could manipulate God’s work to punish those who had wronged
me
. But
we
must turn the other cheek, forgive those who trespass against us. I was so ashamed.”

“‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord.” I wasn’t even aware of speaking aloud till I heard my own voice.

“That will come at Judgment Day,” Tom Clement said approvingly. “In this life, suffering is the sacrifice we owe Him. The greater the sacrifice, the more pleasing it is unto the Lord. Your sacrifice is
very
pleasing because you don’t deserve to suffer. You understand that part, don’t you?
You don’t deserve to suffer
.” He smiled. “And neither do I.”

“Neither does Joyce,” I pointed out. “Is
her
suffering less pleasing for some reason? Or didn’t she suffer enough for you and God?”

“Joyce wasn’t put here to suffer. She has a different role to play.”

“God’s
so
lucky to have you running around taking care of things for Him.” I started to get up and Tom grabbed my wrist. He was a lot stronger than he looked.

“I am only His instrument. Offer your suffering up to Him. To thank Him for sending His only begotten—”

I used the little move my mother had taught me to break his grip; the surprise on his face gave me a thrill of spiteful satisfaction. “
You
offer it up,” I said. “To whatever you’re worshipping as God. I don’t want any part of it.” I started to walk away.

“
Rooo-uth
.”

I froze. He smiled, that we-share-a-secret smile.

“I still suffer, every day,” he said. “No one else’s sacrifices are greater than mine. When I sleep under the porch. When I put on my secondhand underwear. When I walk through the hallways of this school.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Don’t you want to know about Joyce’s part in His plan?”

“No.”

“Liar,” he said in a voice so soft and smooth it was practically a purr. “It’s the same as all of our lovely schoolmates. They’re all God’s children, too. They’re here to
help
us suffer. Even your boyfriend. The gallant Jack? He couldn’t stand me. Could he.”

“Too bad Joyce doesn’t know enough to feel the same way.”

“That’s where
you
come in,” he said. “To her, I’ll always be poor Tom Clement, the guy she tried to do something nice for. Then your father ruined everything. That makes it
your
fault. And she’s not the only one who feels that way.” His smile was practically poisonous. “This time
you’re
the victim to blame, not me.”

I gave a single, hard laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned—misery really
does
love company.” I admit I was baiting him with the
damned
but he let me leave without taking it. I’ve often wondered why but I don’t think I want to know.

So is Tom Clement really the psycho in this story after all?

I mean, if people are only doing things they’d do anyway without your encouragement or approval, it’s not your fault, is it? What could you possibly be guilty of—suffering?

Would a psycho suffer deliberately? In the case of a religious fanatic, yes, absolutely. Religious fanaticism and masochism have been dancing together for millennia. And the only thing misery loves as much as company is more miserable company. Which may be why it’s a pretty overcrowded world.

But not a pretty world. People starve, they beg on the streets, and the way they have to live would make Tom Clement’s space under the porch look cozy, those poor have-nots. And us haves, we
love
what we have—a lot of it is produced by people working in conditions we would never tolerate, for pay that wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee. We wouldn’t force anyone to live like that—well, most of us wouldn’t. But we don’t even try to stop it.

We’re safe in the American dream.
Very
safe—we build as many prisons as schools, maybe more. Yesterday, I read that the U.S. has the highest number of incarcerated people in the world, followed by China and Russia.

If playing God—or acting as His instrument, like Tom—means you’re a psycho, what does that make God?

When I think about that, I suspect Tom Clement’s not the only person with a stash of good luck charms. At least, I hope he isn’t.

Because if he is, that’s worse.

That was the year of omens—the year the coroner cut open the body of the girl who had thrown herself from the bridge, and discovered a bullfrog living in her right lung. The doctor, it was said by the people who told those sorts of stories (and there were many of them), let the girl’s mother take the thing home in her purse—its skin wet and gleaming, its eyes like glittering gallstones—and when she set it in her daughter’s bedroom it croaked out the saddest, sweetest song you ever heard in the voice of the dead girl.

Leah loved to listen to these stories. She was fourteen and almost pretty. She liked dancing and horses, sentimental poetry, certain shades of pink lipstick, and Hector Alvarez, which was no surprise at all, because
everyone
liked Hector Alvarez.

“Tell me what happened to the girl,” Leah would say to her mum, slicing potatoes at the kitchen counter while her mother switched on the oven. Leah was careful always to jam the knifepoint in first so that the potatoes would break open as easily as apples. Her dad had taught her that before he had died. Everything he did was sacred now.

“No,” her mum would say.

“But you know what happened to her?”

“I know what happened, Leah.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

And Leah would feel the slight weight of her mother’s frame like a ghost behind her. Sometimes her mum would touch the back of her neck, just rest a hand there, or on her shoulder. Sometimes, she would check the potatoes. Leah had a white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced badly once.

“You shouldn’t have to hear those things. Those things aren’t for you, okay?”

“But mum—”

“Mum,” Milo would mumble from his highchair. “Mum mum mum mum.”

“Here, lovely girl, fetch me the rosemary and thyme. Oh, and the salt. Enough about that other thing, okay? Enough about it. Your brother is getting hungry.”

And Leah would put down the knife, and would turn from the thin, round slices of potatoes. She would kiss her brother on the scalp where his hair stuck up in fine, whitish strands. Smell the sweet baby scent of him. “Shh, monkey-face, just a little bit longer. Mum’s coming soon.” Then Milo would let out a sharp, breathy giggle, and maybe Leah would giggle too, or maybe she wouldn’t.

Her mum wouldn’t speak of the things that were happening, but Leah knew—of course Leah knew.

First it was the girl. That’s how they always spoke of her.

“Did you hear about
the girl
?”

“Which girl?”

“
The girl
. The one who jumped.”

And then it wasn’t just
the girl
anymore. It was Joanna Sinclair who always made red velvet cupcakes for the school bake sale. She had found her name written in the gossamer threads of a spider web. It was Oscar Nunez from the end of the block whose tongue shrivelled up in his mouth. It was Yasmine with the black eyeliner who liked to smoke pot sometimes when she babysat Leah.

“Maybe it’ll be, I dunno, just this one perfect note. Like a piano,” Yasmine had murmured before it happened, pupils big enough to swallow the violet-circled iris of her eyes. “Or a harp. Or a, what’s it, a zither. I heard one of those once. It was gorgeous.”

“You think so?” Leah asked. She watched the smoke curl around the white edge of her nostrils like incense. There were only four years between them, but those four years seemed a magnificent chasm. Across it lay wisdom and secret truths. Across it lay the Hectors of the world, unattainable if you were only fourteen years old. Everything worthwhile lay across that chasm.

“Maybe. Maybe that’s what it will be for me. Maybe I’ll just hear that one note forever, going on and on and on, calling me to paradise.”

It hadn’t been that. The omens weren’t what you hoped for. They weren’t what you thought they would be. But you
knew
when it was yours. That’s what people said. You could recognize it. You always
knew
.

When Hector found her—(they were dating, of course Hector would only date someone as pretty and wise as Yasmine, Leah thought)—the skin had split at her elbows and chin, peeled back like fragile paper to reveal something bony and iridescent like the inside of an oyster shell.

Leah hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral.

Her mum had told her Yasmine had gone to college, she couldn’t babysit anymore, Leah would have to take care of Milo herself. But Leah was friends with Hector’s sister, Inez, and
she
knew better.

“It was like there was something inside her,” Inez whispered as they both gripped the tiled edge of the pool during the Thursday swim practice, Inez’s feet kicking lazily in hazy, blue-gray arcs. Inez had the same look as her brother, the same widely spaced eyes, skin the same dusty copper as a penny. Her hair clung thick, black and slickly to her forehead where it spilled out of the swimming cap.

“What kind of thing was it?” The water was cold. Leah hated swimming, but her mum made her do it anyway.

“God, I mean, I dunno. Hector won’t tell me. Just that . . . he didn’t think it would be like that. He thought she’d be beautiful on the inside, you know? He thought it would be something else.”

Leah had liked Yasmine—(even though she had always liked Hector more, liked it when Yasmine brought him over and the two of them huddled on the deck while Leah pretended not to watch, the flame of the lighter a third eye between them). Leah had wanted it to be a zither for her. Something sweet and strange and wondrous.

“I thought so too,” Leah whispered, but Inez had already taken off in a perfect backstroke toward the deep end.

It was why her mum never talked about it. The omens weren’t always beautiful things.

There had always been signs in the world. Every action left its trace somewhere. There were clues. There were giveaways. The future whispered to you before you even got there, and the past, well, the past was a chatterbox, it would tell you everything if you let it.

The signs Leah knew best were the signs of brokenness. The sling her mum had worn after the accident that made it impossible for her to carry Milo. The twinging muscle in her jaw that popped and flexed when she moved the wrong way. It had made things difficult for a while. The pain made her mum sharp and prickly. The medication made her dozy. Sometimes she’d nod off at the table, and Leah would have to clear up the dishes herself, and then tend to Milo if he was making a fuss.

And there was the dream.

There had always been signs in the world.

But, now. Now it was different, and the differences both scared and thrilled Leah.

“Mum,” she would whisper. “Please tell me, Mum.”

“I can’t, sweetie,” her mum would whisper in a strained, half-conscious voice. Leah could see the signs of pain now. The way her mum’s lids fluttered. The lilt in her voice from the medication. “I just don’t know. Oh, darling, why? Why? I’m scared. I don’t know what’s happening to the world.”

But Leah wasn’t scared.

A month later Leah found something in the trash: one of her mother’s sheer black stockings. Inside it was the runt-body of a newborn kitten wrapped in a wrinkled dryer sheet.

“Oh, pretty baby,” she cooed.

Leah turned the lifeless little lump over. She moved it gently, carefully from palm to palm. It had the kind of boneless weight that Milo had when he slept. She could do anything to him then, anything at all, and he wouldn’t wake up.

One wilted paw flopped between her pinkie and ring finger. The head lolled. And there—on the belly, there it was—the silver scales of a fish. They flaked away against the calluses on her palm, decorated the thin white line of her scar.

Leah felt a strange, liquid warmth shiver its way across her belly as she held the kitten. It was not hers, she knew it was not hers. Was it her mum who had found the thing? Her mum. Of course it was her mum.

“Oh,” she said. “My little thing. I’m sorry for what’s been done to you.”

She knew she ought to be afraid then, but she wasn’t. She loved the little kitten. It was gorgeous—just exactly the sort of omen that Yasmine ought to have had.

If only it had been alive . . .

Leah didn’t know what her own omen would be. She hoped like Yasmine had that it would be something beautiful. She hoped when she saw it she would know it most certainly as her own special thing. And she knew she would not discard it like the poor drowned kitten—fur fine and whitish around the thick membrane of the eyelids. Not for all the world. Not even if it scared her.

She placed the kitten in an old music box her dad had brought back from Montreal. There was a crystal ballerina, but it was broken and didn’t spin properly. Still, when she opened the lid, the tinny notes of “La Vie en Rose” chimed out slow and stately. The body of the kitten fit nicely against the faded velvet inside of it.

The box felt so light it might have been empty.

Now it was October—just after the last of the September heat had begun to fade off like a cooling cooking pan. Inez and Leah were carving pumpkins together. This was the last year they were allowed to go trick or treating, and even so, they were only allowed to go as long as they took Milo with them. (Milo was going to dress as a little white rabbit. Her mum had already bought the costume.)

They were out on the porch, sucking in the last of the sunlight, their pumpkins squat on old newspapers empty of the stories that Leah really wanted to read.

Carving pumpkins was trickier than cutting potatoes. You had to do it with a very sharp, very small knife. It wasn’t about pressure so much. It was about persistence—taking things slow, feeling your way through it so you didn’t screw up. Inez was better at that. It wasn’t the cutting that Leah liked anyway. She liked the way it felt to shove her hands inside the pumpkin and bring out its long, stringy guts. Pumpkins had a smell: rich and earthy, but sweet too, like underwear if you didn’t change it every day.

“It’s happening to me,” Inez whispered to her. She wasn’t looking at Leah, she was staring intensely at the jagged crook of eye she was trying to get right. Taking it slow. Inez liked to get everything just right.

“What’s happening?” Leah said.

Inez still didn’t look at her, she was looking at the eye of the jack-o’-lantern-to-be, her brow scrunched as she concentrated. But her hand was trembling.

“What’s happening?”

Cutting line met cutting line. The piece popped through with a faint sucking sound.

“You know, Leah. What’s been happening to . . . to everyone. What happened to Yasmine.” Her voice quavered. Inez was still staring at the pumpkin. She started to cut again.

“Tell me,” Leah said. And then, more quietly, she said, “please.”

“I don’t want to.”

Plop
went another eye. The pumpkin looked angry. Or scared. The expressions sometimes looked the same on pumpkins.

“Then why did you even bring it up?” Leah could feel something quivering inside her as she watched Inez saw into the flesh of the thing.

“I just wanted to—I don’t even know. But don’t tell Hector, okay? He’d be worried about me.”

Leah snuck a look at Hector who was raking leaves in the yard. She liked watching Hector work. She liked to think that maybe if the sun was warm enough (as it was today—more of a September sun than an October sun, really) then maybe, just maybe, he would take his shirt off.

“It’s okay to tell me, Inez. Promise. I won’t tell anyone. Just tell me so
someone
out there knows.”

Inez was quiet. And then she said in a small, tight voice, “Okay.”

She put down the knife. The mouth was only half done. Just the teeth. But they were the trickiest part to do properly. Then, carefully, gently, Inez undid the top three buttons of her blouse. She swept away the long, black curls of hair that hid her neck and collarbone.

“It’s here. Do you see?”

Leah looked. At first she thought it was a mild discoloration, the sort of blemish you got if you sat on your hands for too long and the folds of your clothes imprinted themselves into the skin. But it wasn’t that at all. There was a pattern to it, like the jack-o’-lantern, the shapes weren’t meaningless. They were a face. They were the shadow of a face—eyes wide open. Staring.

“Did you tell Hector?”

“I’m telling you.

“God, Inez—”

But Inez turned white and shushed her. “Don’t say that!” Inez squealed. “Don’t say his name like that. We don’t know! Maybe it is, I mean, do you think, maybe He . . . I mean, oh, Jesus, I don’t know, Leah!” Her mouth froze in a little “oh” of horror. There were tears running down her cheeks, forming little eddies around a single, pasty splatter of pumpkin guts.

“It’s okay, Inez. It’s okay.” And Leah put her arm around Inez. “You’ll be okay,” she whispered. “You’ll be okay.”

And they rocked together. So close. Close enough that Leah could feel her cheek pressing against Inez’s neck. Just above the mark. So close she could imagine it whispering to her. There was something beautiful about it all. Something beautiful about the mark pressed against her, the wind making a rustling sound of the newspapers, Hector in the yard, and the long strings of pumpkin guts lined up like glyphs drying in the last of the summer light.

“It’s okay,” Leah told her, but even as they rocked together, their bodies so close Leah could feel the hot, hardpan length of her girlish muscles tense and relax in turns, she knew there was a chasm splitting between them, a great divide.

“Shush,” she said. “Pretty baby,” she said because sometimes that quieted Milo down. Inez wasn’t listening. She was holding on. So hard it hurt.

Inez was dead the next day.

Leah was allowed to attend the funeral. It was the first funeral she’d been allowed to go to since her dad’s.

The funeral had a closed casket (of course, it had to) but Leah wanted to see anyway. She pressed her fingers against the dark, glossy wood of the coffin, leaving a trail of smudged fingerprints that stood out like boot marks in fresh snow. She wanted to see what had happened to that face with the gaping eyes. She wanted to know who that face had belonged to. No one would tell her. From her mum, it was still nothing but, “Shush up, Leah.”