Saint Maybe (35 page)

He walked around to the phone booth at one side of the building and called home. “Mom?” he said. “Is Daphne there?”

“Why, no, I thought she was at school.”

“They got out at noon today.”

“Well, you might try calling the Locklear girl,” she said. “Shall I look up her telephone number?”

“Never mind,” Ian said.

He wondered how his mother could stay so naive.
She must work at it. She still thought the biggest issue confronting a teenaged girl was whether or not to kiss on the first date, and the answer (he’d heard her tell Daphne) was no, no, no. “You have years and years to do all that. You don’t want them saying you’re cheap.”

He drove to Gideon’s—a sagging, unpainted house on Greenmount—and parked sloppily and crossed the porch in two strides and rang the doorbell. No one answered, but he sensed a sudden freezing of movement somewhere inside the house. He opened the screen and knocked on the inner door. Shading his eyes, he peered through the windowpane. He saw a threadbare rug, part of a banister, and then Gideon lumbering down the stairs, tucking his shirt into his jeans. For a moment they faced each other through the glass. Gideon yawned. He opened the door and stuck his head out.

“I’d like to speak to Daphne,” Ian told him.

Gideon considered. “Okay,” he said finally.

He had a burnt, ashy smell, as if his skin were smoldering. And although his shirt was more or less tucked in now, it wasn’t buttoned. A slice of his bare chest showed through. “Daph!” he called. “Your uncle’s here.” He went on facing Ian. Up close, his hair was brittle as broom straw. The color must come from a bottle.

“Ian?” Daphne said. She came clomping down the stairs in her combat boots. Her face looked puckered, the way it did when she first woke up, and her eyes were slits. “What are
you
doing here?” she asked, arriving next to Gideon.

“I might ask you the same,” Ian told her.

“We had a half day. I forgot to mention.”

“Did you also forget the way home?”

She adjusted an earring.

“Let’s go,” Ian told her. “I’m running late.”

“Can Gideon come?”

“Not this time.”

She didn’t argue. She tossed Gideon a look, and Gideon gazed back at her expressionlessly. Then she unhooked her leather jacket from the newel post. She shrugged herself into it, slung her knapsack over her shoulder, and followed Ian out to the car.

When they’d been driving a while she said, “You didn’t have to be rude to him.”

“I wasn’t rude. I just want to talk to you alone.”

She clutched her knapsack to her chest. Now that she sat so close, he realized she too had that burnt smell. And her lips were swollen and blurry, and a red splotch stretched from her throat to the neckline of her Black Sabbath T-shirt.

“Daph,” he said.

She hugged her knapsack tighter.

“Daphne, some things are not what they seem,” he said.

“Watch out for that car,” she told him.

“I mean some
people
aren’t what they seem. People you imagine you’ll be with forever, say—”

“That car’s edging over the line, Ian.”

She meant the dark green Plymouth that was wavering a bit in the right-hand lane just ahead. “No doubt some teenager,” Ian grumbled.

“Prejudice, prejudice!” Daphne scolded him. “Nope, it’s an old man. See how low his head is? Some white-haired old man just barely peeking over the steering wheel and hanging on for dear life.”

Ian said, “What I’m trying to tell you—”

“He’s showing off for his girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend!”

“See the lady next to him? Probably this hot-and-heavy pickup from the Senior Citizens’ Center. He’s showing her how in-charge he is, and reliable and steady.”

Ian snorted. He applied his brakes and fell behind, allowing the Plymouth more room.

“You think I don’t know what I’m up to, don’t you,” Daphne said.

“Pardon?”

“You think I’m some ninny who wants to do right but keeps goofing. But what you don’t see is, I goof on purpose. I’m not like you: King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe.”

“
Now
look,” Ian said. “The Plymouth is slowing down too. Seems he’s set on staying with us.”

“Mess up, I say!” Daphne crowed. “Fall flat on your face! Make every mistake you can think of! Use all the life you’ve got!”

Ian glanced over at her, but he didn’t speak.

“Let’s pass,” Daphne told him.

“Pass?”

“Speed up and pass. This driver’s a turkey.”

He obeyed. He whizzed through a yellow light, leaving the Plymouth behind, while Daphne rolled down her window and squawked out: “Attention! Attention! Lady in the green car! Your date’s been spotted on an FBI’s Most Wanted poster! I repeat!”

“Honestly, Daphne,” Ian said. But he was smiling.

He turned down Waverly Street, pulled up in front of the house, and sat there with the engine running. He said, “Daph?”

“Thanks for the lift,” she told him, and she hopped out.

He watched her cut across the front lawn—her knapsack bouncing, her ragged hair ruffling. The sole of one combat boot was working loose, and at every step she had to swing her left foot unnaturally high off the ground and stamp down hard. It gave her a slapdash, rollicking gait. It made her seem glorious. He was still smiling when he drove away.

* * *

At Prayer Meeting, the church always felt even smaller and cozier than it did ordinarily. It was something to do with the darkness closing in around it, Ian supposed. This was especially true tonight, for he was early and the fluorescent lights had not yet been switched on. He made his way through the rows of dimly gleaming metal chairs. He stepped behind the shop counter and tapped on the office door, which showed a thin line of yellow around the edges.

“Come in,” Reverend Emmett called.

He was sitting in one of the armchairs with his legs stretched out very long and straight. He was thumbing through a hymn pamphlet. “Why, Ian!” he said, smiling, and he rose to his feet in his loose-strung, jerky manner.

Ian said, “Reverend Emmett—”

He probably could have stopped right there. Reverend Emmett looked so crestfallen, all of a sudden; he must have guessed what Ian was about to say.

“It’s not only whether I’d be
able
to give people answers,” Ian told him. “It’s whether I’d want to. Whether I’d feel right about it.”

Reverend Emmett went on waiting, and Ian knew he should explain further. He should tell him about the sign from God. He should say what the sign had finally recalled to him: Lucy rushing home out of breath, laughing and excited, and his own arrogant certitude that he had an obligation to inform his brother. But that would have opened the way for debate. (When is something philosophical acceptance and when is it dumb passivity? When is something a moral decision and when is it scar tissue?) He wasn’t up to that. He just said, “I’m sorry.”

Reverend Emmett said, “I’m sorry, too.”

“I hope we can still be friends,” Ian told him.

“Yes, of course,” Reverend Emmett said gently.

Out in the main room, Ian lowered himself into a seat and unbuttoned his jacket. His fingers felt weak, as if he’d come through an ordeal. To steady himself, he bowed his head and prayed. He prayed as he almost always did, not forming actual words but picturing instead this spinning green planet safe in the hands of God, with the children and his parents and Ian himself small trusting dots among all the other dots. And the room around him seemed to rustle with prayers from years and years past:
Let me get well
and
Make her love me
and
Forgive what I have done
.

Then Sister Myra arrived with Sister Edna and flipped the light switch, flooding the room with a buzzing glare, and soon afterward others followed and settled themselves noisily. Ian sat among them, at peace, absorbing the cheery sound of their voices and the gaudy, bold, forthright colors of their clothes.

9

T
he spring of 1988 was the wettest anyone could remember. It rained nearly every day in May, and all the storm drains overflowed and the gutters ran like rivers and the Bedloes’ roof developed a leak directly above the linen closet. One morning when Daphne went to get a fresh towel she found the whole stack soaked through. Ian called Davidson Roofers, but the man who came said there wasn’t a thing he could do till the weather cleared. Even then they’d have a wait, he said, because half the city had sprung leaks in this downpour. So they kept a saucepan on the top closet shelf with a folded cloth in the bottom to muffle the constant drip, drip. Of course they’d moved the linens elsewhere, but still the upstairs hall smelled of something dank and swampy. Ian said it was him. He said he had mildew of the armpits.

Then along came June, dry as a bone. Only one brief shower fell that entire scorching month, and the yard turned brown and the cat lay stretched on the cool kitchen floor as flat as she could make herself. By that time, though, the Bedloes hardly cared; for Bee had awakened one June morning unable to speak, and two days later she was dead.

Agatha and her husband flew in from California. Thomas came down from New York. Claudia and Macy arrived from Pittsburgh with their two youngest, George
and Henry; and their oldest, Abbie, drove up from Charleston. The house was not just full but splitting at the seams. Still, Daphne felt oddly lonesome. Late at night she cruised the dark rooms, stepping over sleeping bags, brushing past a snoring shape on the couch, and she thought,
Somebody’s missing
. She poured a shot of her grandfather’s whiskey and stood drinking it at the kitchen window, and she thought,
It’s Grandma
. In all the flurry of arrivals and arrangements, it seemed they had lost track of that.

But after everyone left again, Bee’s absence seemed almost a presence. Doug spent hours shut away in his room. Ian grew broody and distant. Daphne was working for a florist at the moment, and after she closed shop she would often just stay on downtown—grab a bite to eat and then maybe hit a few bars with some friends, go home with someone she hardly knew just to keep occupied. Who could have guessed that Bee would leave such a vacancy? Over the past few years she had seemed to be diminishing, fading into the background. It was Ian who’d appeared to be running things. Now Daphne saw that that wasn’t the case at all. Or maybe it was like those times you experience a physical ailment—stomach trouble, say, and you think,
Why, I never realized before that the stomach is the center of the body
, and then a headache and you think,
No, wait, it’s the head that’s the center …

July was as dry as June, and the city started rationing water. You could sprinkle your lawn only between nine at night and nine in the morning. Ian said fine; he just wouldn’t sprinkle at all. It just wasn’t worth the effort, he said. The grass turned brittle, like paper held close to a candle flame. The hydrangeas wilted and drooped. When Davidson Roofers arrived one morning to hammer overhead, Daphne wondered why they bothered.

Late in August a gentle, pattering rain began one afternoon,
and people ran out of their houses and flung open their arms and raised their faces to the sky. Daphne, walking home from the bus stop, thought she knew how plants must feel; her skin received each cool, sweet drop so gratefully. But the rain stopped short ten minutes later as if someone had turned a faucet off, and that was the end of that.

Then summer was over—the hardest summer in history, her grandfather said. (He meant because of Bee’s death, of course. He had probably not even noticed the drought.) But fall was not much wetter, or much more cheerful either.

October marked the longest Daphne had ever held a job—one entire year—and the florist gave her a raise. Her friends said now that she was making more money she ought to rent a place of her own. “You’re right,” she told them. “I’m going to start looking. I know I should. Any day I will.” No one could believe she still lived at home with her family.

That Thanksgiving was their first without Bee. It wasn’t a holiday Agatha usually returned for—she was an oncologist out in L.A., with a very busy practice-but this time she did, accompanied of course by Stuart. When Daphne came home from work Wednesday evening, she found Agatha washing carrots at the kitchen sink. They kissed, and Agatha said, “We’ve just got back from the grocery. There wasn’t a thing to eat in the fridge.”

“Well, no,” Daphne said, leaning against a counter. “We thought we’d have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant.”

“That’s what Grandpa said.”

As usual, Agatha wore a tailored white blouse and a navy skirt. She must have a closetful; she dressed like a missionary. Her black hair curled at her jawline in the docile, unremarkable style of those generic women in
grade-school textbooks, and her face was uniformly white, as if her skin were thicker than other people’s. Heavy, black-rimmed glasses framed her eyes. You could tell she thought prettiness was a waste of time. She could have been pretty—another woman with those looks
would
have been pretty—but she preferred not to be. Probably she disapproved of Daphne’s tinkling earrings and Indian gauze tunic; probably even her jeans, which Daphne did have to lie down to get into.