Stranded (4 page)

NATALIE HAD GOTTEN PREGNANT IN THE SPRING
without realizing it. She carried the baby seven months even as she continued to attend her youth group meetings. Then one day she went into labor. She gave birth (Mom wasn’t sure of the details of where) and lay the baby in a field where the farmer found her (unfortunately too late). According to Mom, Natalie didn’t know what was happening when she started putting on weight and thought she had a food allergy that caused bloating. By the time she understood that she had a real problem, she had no time to invent a better solution than abandoning Baby Grace.

I told Mom that Natalie fibbed.

“No, honey,” Mom said.

I suspected Natalie had invented the story to get me
in trouble with Nana. That girl had a very sneaky side. Somewhere around the house was a piece of paper on which my cousin had sworn to remain a virgin until her wedding day, and though Natalie had real hormones coursing through her bloodstream, they always seemed like they were in their protophase—at least compared to mine. Natalie wouldn’t have lied to Pastor Jim. If I could find her promise certificate, I could prove that what Mom was telling me was just another of my cousin’s weird inventions.

Losing your virginity isn’t that easy. I had been trying to rid myself of mine for months without luck. Mom listened to me rationalize and patted my hair in the soothing way she had stroked me long ago when she invented the planet Schmoo.

I made her stop.

She tiptoed to our bedroom to see if Natalie was sleeping and then she came back and climbed under her covers. One of her bare feet crossed over my shin as she huddled close. We kept our voices hushed.

“She’s out like a light,” Mom said.

“Does Nana know?” I asked.

“No,” Mom whispered. “Your cousin didn’t understand for sure what was changing her. She probably didn’t show. She kept her outward appearance the
same. She called me two weeks ago to tell me.”

“Nana didn’t suspect?” I asked, amazed.

Nana learned through telepathy that I had eaten a jelly sandwich in my room the day before.

“Your nana might have wondered about the extra pounds, but she believed Natalie’s excuse that she had a gluten issue. Nana puts a lot of faith in Natalie. So do a lot of people. In many ways, Natalie’s a very special girl.”

“You mean pretty,” I said.

The girl had diabolical good looks.

“Yes,” Mom said.

“Was it her bearded boyfriend who got her pregnant?”

“Oh, I hadn’t heard about him.” Mom scratched an itch on her cheek. “Who is he?”

“Someone she talked about.” I chipped some of the polish off one of my nails. I hadn’t gotten to filing them.

I wished I could provide Mom with details, but I had tipped the glass of soda instead of finding out more. Mom pulled her comforter toward us. Maybe I needed charm school, one of those interventions where they made you walk around with a book on your head.

“Natalie was only able to tell me certain parts of
the story, baby, and I had to put the rest together. She is so young and inexperienced. I’m sure the last few months were traumatic. People can be very unkind. We can’t breathe a word of this. Your cousin’s life has been hard enough already, and you know how Natalie loves Pastor Jim.”

“She’s insane about him,” I said, remembering how Natalie had described Pastor Jim as “special.” I thought she had just been implying that he didn’t like gay people either.

“You can’t tell Katy.” Mom maybe read my thoughts. “We have to pretend this never happened. We have to act like Natalie is the same girl.”

“We aren’t going to talk about it at all?” I protested.

If I had been the one to get pregnant, Katy would have pointed to the loaf of bread popping from under my shirt and straight out asked me who had inflated my inner tube. Then she would have blabbed to someone, and the next thing you know I would have been at the Women’s Health Clinic, or pushing a stroller through the mall like other girls of our acquaintance.

“It has to be our little secret, baby,” Mom said.

Before I could ask what would happen if Natalie was caught, the outside door clicked, Nana returning from
card night. We heard a muffled scream.

“She overheard us.” I panicked.

Mom flung the covers from our legs and we both rushed into the living room. I expected to find Nana sprawled in a heap, gray with the pallor of death. Instead, she stood over the soda stain with her hand covering her mouth. I could tell she wasn’t going to believe my excuse that a breeze had tipped the glass. Mom explained what she thought had really happened.

“Oh my Lord,” Nana said, expressing her frustration. She sent me to bed, then she and Mom initiated a new process of blotting and dabbing. From my room, I heard what sounded like paper towels ripped from the roll.

I also heard Nana rage about how careless and irresponsible I was while I listened through the walls. I worried that Nana might burst into the bedroom, brush me into a dustpan, and flush me down the toilet as part of the cleaning and bleaching, which kept her occupied for two hours. I couldn’t relax knowing Nana thought
I
was the most scandalous member of the Sorenson family while Natalie slept peacefully in the bed across the room from me.

Natalie was curled into a C, her cheek pressed to her palms, her long lashes brushing her cheek. She looked
about as guilty as an angel atop a Christmas tree, and I couldn’t shake the feeling Mom had made a mistake, had misunderstood the situation somehow. I watched Natalie breathing, the little hamster in my head spinning his wheel.

When I was a kid, I used to believe another me awoke and interacted with the world while the day me nodded off, and that out there I had another existence miles from everything I had control over. As hard as I tried to catch a glimpse of the other girl inside me, I never succeeded. I kept hoping she was fabulous, but you never know, she could be unconsciously attracted to knee socks—I could nod off and wake up dressed in corduroy.

The next morning, Nana marched into my room four hours earlier than I usually woke up on a Sunday. All the secrets and revelations of the night before rose too, and I couldn’t tell whether I was hung over from gin or I had gone to buy groceries at the Jack and Jill and a baby fell out, just like I had joked with Katy.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Nana told me to wash my face and get into my clothes, it was time a monkey like me greeted the day. Natalie’s bed was empty, her covers smoothed and her pillows lined against her headboard.

“Where is Li?” I was suddenly deeply afraid that she had disappeared. Li was one of Natalie’s nicknames, one Mom used and I almost never did.

“Out shopping with your mother.” Nana raised a shade.

In the bright light of morning, the heart-shaped pillow with the white frill around its edge on Natalie’s bed reminded me of a ripe cherry Life Saver. It had probably been sewn by a six-year-old girl in a sweatshop somewhere in Pakistan. It had the word
love
stitched right on it.

“Nana?” I asked, stalling, rubbing my eyes.

She told me that I had five minutes, which was no time really, to get myself ready because she was taking me with her to church. She probably didn’t think it safe to leave me alone in the house with her carpet a second time.

She chose a skirt from the closet and I drew it over the leggings I had slept in. I borrowed a sweater from Natalie’s drawer and poked my hair, washed toothpaste over my stale gin breath. I dug in the closet until I found my new boots. Nana made me change them, telling me the heels made me look like a call girl—which translated as hot-tamale-Pisquale in Katy-speak. I was willing to do things Nana’s way without
argument. I loved my Nana despite her objections to stillettos. She stood, purse in hand, waiting while I made the necessary adjustments.

“Do I have to go?” I asked, knowing what her answer would be in advance.

“What do you think, young lady?” Nana became impatient with my inquisitiveness.

I stroked my hair with Natalie’s brush and nearly electrocuted myself with the static. Nana consulted her watch and fiddled with the knob on my bedroom door. Her pale gray eyes shot beams when she realized the time.

“Can we drive?” I asked.

“You need a little fresh air,” she said. “Find yourself a coat.”

When we reached the door and the sun streamed in, my eyeballs just about fell out. I wondered if my sunglasses had enough UV protection to help me deal with all the shining judgment flooding the driveway and my hungover senses. My guess was likely not.

ONE GOOD THING ABOUT LYNN STREET WAS THAT
we were near the church so the walk in the daylight was short. Black patches of ice covered the walkways, a result of the rain and temperature drop from the night before. My nose dripped. Nana dug into her bag and retrieved a blue tissue and handed it to me. I would have preferred a handkerchief because I loved the trees even if Nana didn’t, yet nothing as unsanitary as a reusable cloth handkerchief had been in Nana’s possession since 1969, the year they began making stuff you could throw away.

Nana strode beside me, her head held high, her square-heeled shoes clopping on the walk. She somehow knew where the pavement was booby-trapped. Any other old lady might have complained about the
wind, but my grandmother was the Clint Eastwood of her euchre club.

Even so, I worried about her as I trudged at her side. Nana held her worldview to her like a shield. Her face turned white at the slightest hint that the toilet might overflow, and, when I forgot to scrape my shoes on the mat once, she began wheezing. Thinking of her overcome with Natalie’s news nearly made me blubber and sniff so hard I would need six blue trees’ worth of tissue to sop me up. Aunt Denise had tested Nana. My mother had disappointed her by becoming pregnant with me. My grandfather had lost his farm and left Nana a widow, and yet Nana marched on, trusting that her churchy beliefs would one day save all of us.

A car passed driving twelve miles an hour the way old people do on a Sunday morning in Heaven. The distraction allowed me to hide my emotions from Nana. Someone rolled the window down, and a friend of Nana’s waved and warbled hello. The friend was wearing white gloves. Where did she buy them? The world was full of deep, unsolvable mysteries.

The neighbor in the car was one I had seen in my grandparents’ wedding album. In the old photos, all of Nana’s best girlfriends looked young, happy, and full of life. Nana had been a joyful person, laughing
over her shoulder at her bouquet-jostling bridesmaids in their wide-brimmed hats. Those had to have been better times. To hear Nana talk, the worst thing she and her friends had ever done was grease a litter of pigs so her farmer father couldn’t catch and slaughter them. She could laugh about that antic until the tears rolled down her face. The funniest thing that ever happened to me was that my cousin abandoned a baby in a cornfield.

I reached into my jacket pocket and retrieved the pair of sunglasses I had fumbled for on my way out the door.

“Tuck your shirt in, miss,” my grandmother instructed as we neared the church. She could not abide clothes that lapped over other clothes.

Even though the temperatures were subfreezing, the famous Pastor Jim, author of the quote “People shouldn’t tamper with other people’s things,” stood at the entrance without a hat or coat, greeting groups as they approached. He shook hands with the foursome from the car and then a family behind them. He lunged at the two children, doing an imitation of an ape.

He didn’t appear to have any evil tics, at least not ones as easily spotted as the man who bashed his wife on
20/20
. I suspected Pastor Jim of having an unhealthy influence on Natalie’s life. Maybe he was the crazy
madman behind her loony secret. I hoped he wasn’t planning on coming after me.

What kind of spiritual leader
wants
pregnant girls to hide their babies, though?

My grandmother and I stepped toward him, and Pastor Jim clasped Nana’s hands.

“How are you today, Cecile?” he asked.

She sighed and said she was fine but feeding more mouths these days and some of those mouths could be quite sassy and unappreciative. She arched an eyebrow at me.

“You bear up well,” Pastor Jim remarked.

Then he took my hand. “So good you could join us today, Kelly Marie.” He gave me a vigorous pump, as friendly as a golden retriever.

“I’ve heard about you from your cousin.” He smiled.

“Louise,” I corrected.

“Oh yes, Kelly Louise,” he reminded himself.

He continued to hold my hand, though he was looking at Nana.

“Thank you for the information about Guatemala you sent the other day,” Nana interrupted, sensing me about to ask about multiplufornication tables. Nana knew my moods.

Had Pastor Jim done screwy things to Natalie’s mind,
maybe without intending to? Natalie repeated things he said, like: “We should strive to be pure of heart” and “Our deeds now shall be recorded in our future,” which were statements that didn’t seem to have double meanings—but maybe if you played them backward on a tape recorder you could hear devilishness in them. Though Natalie treated Pastor Jim like the keeper of the Pearly Gates, to me he earned maybe a six on the Maximum Man scale, getting what points he did for looking like Al Gore.

“God be with you.” He squeezed my hand before he released me. A fairly large number of people streamed up the steps behind us, so he had to move on to the next set of handshakes.

Nana and I entered the apse and waited while a crew taped down a wire for a television camera. When they were finished, Nana conducted me to an empty pew close to the front of the left aisle. I slid in first, all the way, and leaned my head on the wall.

“They’ve been filming services since…” Nana whispered, stopping her words before she mentioned Baby Grace.

Baby Grace was a lump in both our throats for a few seconds.

One of the cameras had a NewsCenter 6 logo. I
might be on television in Des Moines later, in an update about how the town of Heaven was coping with its recent tragedy. Somehow I didn’t feel like waving to Katy, and it wasn’t just because my hair was frizzy.

The church building had no windows. Spotlights illuminated the pulpit, and the cross behind it was lit by blue bulbs on its underside. The advantage of a church so big was that it could double as a reception room for weddings. The pews were detachable, so if Pastor Jim wanted to convert the space into a bowling alley, he could probably do that, too, at very little expense.

Nana put her hand over mine and squeezed hard, the way you might grip a dog’s leash if you were afraid of it leaping at another dog or spinning in a circle and biting its own leg. The room was crowded with people who knew my cousin. I folded my bulletin into a paper airplane. Since I was in his house anyway, I decided to ask God if he would help me. I wanted him to keep my family safe and not send down a lightning bolt to fry us to ashes, because, let’s face it, that would be embarrassing. I hoped he might give us a chance to prove we were who Nana hoped we would be when she opted for the white rug in the living room, instead of a more practical color for soda-and-gin drinkers like bright orange.

The Sorensons had such a bad track record, maybe we should be a little more humble in our decorating choices.

A click and a buzz signaled that the organist had plugged in and the processional was about to start. I sometimes asked God to get me through longish or particularly dullish classes at school. He seemed like he was paying attention and maybe he had made time move faster. A short man with a receding hairline climbed to the pulpit and read from a piece of white paper those announcements that were also printed on my airplane: The flowers were a gift from the Allen John Deere Dealership in honor of Baby Grace. Youth group should assemble on Friday afternoon. What if—I thought a little more loudly—I did what Mom asked and pretended the incident hadn’t happened? Do baby abandoners get do-overs?

I offered my soul to encourage God to say yes. I wasn’t doing anything with it.

God, as usual, said nothing.

No matter how far she fell, Natalie would always understand more about what he wanted than I did. To me, he was an even bigger mystery than why people watch
Medium
.

While I debated whether I wasn’t being too greedy
in asking him so many favors, and that’s why he was distant, a woman and her three children, latecomers, shifted Nana over so they could share our pew. Ushers unfolded chairs at the back to accommodate the numbers still arriving. Nana moved her hand to her wrist and hid her watch from me. (I was trying to peek to see if the secondhand had done anything interesting or miraculous). It seemed wrong that I should have a place near the front that would have been better filled by someone who knew the territory. I wondered if I could convince Nana to let me go home before Pastor Jim took the stage.

I unfolded the paper airplane and clasped my hands so I actually looked like I was praying.

How about it, God? I asked.

The two little boys on the other side of Nana giggled at the way I flashed my hands open and shut, at first to entertain myself but, when I saw how happy it made them, for their benefit. Their mother tried to settle them and encourage them to stop wiggling. The boys’ sister—a toddler in a frilled dress, white tights, and shiny black leather shoes—rolled onto the floor after a crayon. Nana pulled the hymnal from its slot and paged ahead for the recitation.

I mumbled along to the call and response, and a few
minutes later Pastor Jim thundered onto the stage. He approached the pulpit a different man than the one who greeted me and Nana in front of the church. Instead of friendly, he seemed stern, and the difference made me sit straighter and pay close attention. He took three long steps to the center of the riser, the sound of his footfalls strengthened by the microphone clipped to his lapel.

Here it comes, I thought, thinking of the billboards on the way into town.

Pastor Jim didn’t have a beard, and he was wearing laced black shoes instead of Birkenstocks, but he channeled a pretty believable inner prophet. He raised his voice over the coughs and shuffling paper. I could imagine him grappling in a ring with a caped and horned opponent, fat men cheering him and smoking cigars. You could believe there was a phone booth that Pastor Jim had jumped into just before the sermon started. The entire congregation hushed into silence. The coughing stopped.

“We have been shamed.” Pastor Jim leaned toward the first row.

He didn’t choose a comforting note to begin on, like the joys of the pre-Yuletide season or being kind to Mother Earth, and his words rolled into a description
of how a young girl’s fall was like a domino tipping into another domino. He explained that one sin led to another until the threads of society thinned and frayed. One misdeed, he claimed, jeopardized all our forebears had built after they arrived on the prairie to homestead.

Somehow I had hoped God would lay better on me when he got in touch. I already knew the planet was rolling speedily downhill since Nana’s pig-greasing days. Our rivers were polluted and our teens too cynical, just like Nana claimed. It was hard to escape the news. The question was, what were we supposed to do about it? Pastor Jim ran his hand through his hair and slapped the back of one hand into the open palm of the other.

“The body of a young girl”—Pastor Jim spoke carefully while simultaneously casting his eye over the full pews—“is a vessel that can be filled with light. She walks on special ground. She contains Jesus’ perfection and shares in the glory He brings to the world, the creation of Iowa and its beautiful fertile fields.

“I ask you”—Pastor Jim lifted his voice again—“what
you
will do. How you will change what has come to pass.”

People glanced at one another. They weren’t sure
how they were supposed to answer.

I suspected it was a trick question.

Nana put her hand on my shoulder, and I turned to meet her gray eyes. Her touch meant, “Kelly Louise, I forgive you for the mess on the carpet.”

She had no idea how hard forgiving was going to have to be.

One of the boys on the other side of Nana hit the other. The little girl pushed her bottom into the air. Nana helped tip the girl upright so her underpants wouldn’t show, but thirty seconds later the little acrobat was upside down again. Pastor Jim spoke for thirty minutes about the Gospel of Saint John.

“Are you there, God? It’s me, Kelly Louise.” I left another message, but the sermon continued and I didn’t hear anyone other than Pastor Jim.