Sweet Jesus (23 page)

Hannah felt his warm breath against her ear, and a delirious feeling like a hive of bees started buzzing between her legs. It was one of those warm summer nights when the air is thick and the distance blurred in a sultry haze and there isn’t a breath of wind and everything is as motionless as a dream. Hannah dove into the turquoise pool, the underwater lights warm to the touch and yellow against her skin. She was sure pilots flying overhead could see their shiny rectangle from the air, their insect bodies in the water. There was the brightness and being exposed and almost naked and wet. The water spinning its silver threads of mercury across the surface. Hannah hung under the diving board and watched Caiden swim towards her through the oily blue water, his chest whiter than his arms, his brown hair puffing out like a jellyfish as his body caught up before the next breaststroke propelled him forward again. He crossed the pool in one breath, surfacing indecently close to her, and hung off the diving board too. Wrap your legs around my waist, he said and Hannah did. Then he slipped a finger inside her bathing suit.

You’re like a swollen butterfly, he said, and Hannah didn’t really know what the protocol was, so she just hung there from the diving board, passive as the air, feeling the ecstatic currents coursing through her body.

Around midday, they passed a chaingang of inmates, in grey overalls and orange vests, picking garbage off the roadside with silver claws at the end of steel rods. It was Connie’s first time driving the truck. Just past Kansas City, a billboard with white and yellow sunrays bursting out from behind the word
JESUS
printed in bright green capital letters, with
For President
graffitied underneath it.

Someone must have told them I was coming, Zeus said, dead-pan.

Do your parents know you’re coming? Hannah asked. Have you even spoken to them yet?

Zeus was shaking his head.

So you don’t have any concrete plans about how this is all going to pan out?

I’m thinking I’ll arrive by bus, he said. That’s about as concrete as it gets. Zeus lifted his legs and hugged his knees, then stretched his feet out on top of the dashboard with the toes of his shoes bent back against the windshield.

You must be nervous, Connie said and took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at him sideways.

Nervous isn’t even close to what I’m feeling, Zeus said, dropping his feet to the floor and sitting up again. I mean, what am I supposed to say to them? What if they don’t like how it makes them feel, to see me face to face?

I guess there’s no way of knowing, Connie said.

Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m nervous about coming face to face with the Global Kingdom of Salvation Center,
Hannah said. I don’t want to get smothered by people with good intentions.

But misled hearts? Connie said. It’s not one of those crazy right-wing places, Zeus. At least, I don’t
think
it is.

Look, I’m not against Christians, Hannah said. I’ve got too many in my life that I love, right? And sometimes they do good works. A lot of poor people get fed by Christians every year.

And orphans adopted, Zeus said.

Thank you, Zeus. Another
excellent
example of Christian charity, Hannah said. It’s just that I don’t like spiritual pushiness. Or too much earnestness, or reverence. Too much reverence always makes me feel like causing trouble.

You don’t have to get involved, you know? Nobody’s
forcing
you, Connie said. I didn’t even think you were planning on going inside.

How about showing a little respect for
my
religious feelings here?

I didn’t think you
had
religious feelings.

Why does everything have to be so spelled out for you before you’ll even acknowledge it?

Because it’s hard to know what you’re dealing with when things are so, what’s the word for it – nebulous?

Hannah laughed. As if God, himself, isn’t nebulous.

Can you just be genuine for, like, one moment?

I thought I
was
being genuine.

Connie rolled her eyes. So what about you, Zeus? We’re not that far away now. What are you going to do when we get there?

I’m going to have the pancake special, he said and pointed at a sign advertising breakfast specials at a restaurant just off the highway at the next exit.

The sisters both glanced at him with something like appreciation. It was turning out to be so good having him there, sitting in the middle, with his own disarming perspective.

Okay, Zeus, Connie said, go have your stack o’pancakes, and she signalled for the exit. It was Friday, mid-morning, the parking lot wide open. Connie drove diagonally across the white lines and stopped outside the restaurant. A sloped red roof. In the window, a poster for their Halloween specials.

When they got out of the truck, the sun was warm and the air so gentle for the first of November that they lingered outside. Hannah leaned against the truck and Connie sat down on the curb outside the restaurant. Zeus joined her and together they raised their faces to the sun and closed their eyes until a car pulled up and parked nearby. A woman got out and opened the back door for a little girl who was bawling. The woman said, Come on, Britney, I’ve had enough now. Do you want your flapjacks or not?

The girl nodded, still crying in the back seat. The woman left her there and walked into the restaurant. The girl threw herself down on the seat and disappeared from view. Her crying petered out now that her audience had left. She got out of the car and kicked the door shut. She was wearing a pink tracksuit and white runners and her hair was pulled into a ponytail, the size of a banana, on one side of her head. To Connie, she looked about the same age as Emma. She started heading towards the restaurant with all the lamentation of a funeral march, stooped forward and dragging her feet, arms heavy at her side. She walked past them and Connie said, tenderly, What’s the matter, sweetheart?

The girl looked indignant – that her sad pageant should be interrupted at all! I lost my fucking tooth, she said. And now she was all sass, one hand resting on her cocked hip.

Zeus leaned back and lifted his shirt. He was doing something with his muscles that made his stomach fold in on itself so that his bellybutton disappeared. And
I
lost my fucking bellybutton! he shouted.

The girl took a second to decide, then slapped her leg and threw her head back and laughed. Without looking back, she skipped into the restaurant, still laughing out loud. They followed her inside.

Apart from the girl and her mother, the place was empty. A stop sign immediately inside, asking them to
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
. A waitress waved them to a booth, two over from the mother and her daughter, and came back to take their order. She was wearing earrings made of a dangling cluster of red, white, and blue stars. A coffee for Hannah and an orange juice for Connie. Zeus ordered tea.

Sweetened or unsweetened? the waitress asked in a southern drawl.

With sugar, please, Zeus said, and she brought him an enormous glass of iced tea.

Oh, he said, when she put it down in front of him.

You wanted hot tea?

That’s all right, he said, clenching his buttocks to get high enough to close his mouth around the open throat of the tall white straw.

He moved the glass with both hands, like a child, Hannah thought. That glass makes you look small, she said and suddenly felt the soulless, desolate fact of a place like this. She ordered French toast, Connie had a waffle, and Zeus took the special.

They were all looking out at the parking lot when a guy on a big Harley pulled up beside the truck, black-and-white markings on the gas tank like a baby killer whale. The driver
seemed to have stopped to admire their truck. He was wearing black leather boots with shiny buckles, a voluminous hip-length fur coat, the colour of butterscotch, fur mittens to match, and a skull-cap helmet. He was sitting on a plastic garment bag, laid over his gas tank, with the tip of the hanger hooked around the gas cap.

Look at that idiot, Connie said.

I think he looks great, Hannah said. I think he looks really cool.

The mittens are a nice touch, Zeus said.

Connie tsked. That kind of extravagant vanity out there, she said, is a slippery slope.

I’m sorry, Hannah said, but who on this trip’s got the fancy clothes and the expensive European cosmetics?

Those are transient luxuries, Connie said pompously, pushing a finger through the syrup on her plate. Gone the way as all the rest of my worldly belongings. Nope, as for me now, I’m looking forward to the rewards of heaven.

You know, Hannah said, Mom said the very same thing once. In a restaurant, in Toronto. In fact, we were all there. Even you, Zeus, although you were just a kid. She said, if Dad ever died, she’d want to die too, or very soon there afterwards. In fact, they were both kind of looking forward to, you know, shacking up in the afterlife, so to speak.

Speaking of morbid, Connie said. Remember that time Mom told you about that vision a friend of hers had? How you appeared to her in a vision? You were surrounded by people in long, hooded robes and you were naked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hannah said, and I was inserting a phallic object into my vagina.

Je
-sus, Zeus said, shooting backwards in the booth.

Nice, eh? Connie said.

Why was she even talking to a friend about you like that in the first place? Zeus said.

It was when she was doing exorcisms in the attic of that house in Toronto, Hannah said. Before they moved out west. Did you even know that was going on? It was happening when you were living with them. Mom was casting demons out of middle-class professionals. That was her job.

Yeah, I’d get home from school and someone would be screaming at the top of the house.

Really? Hannah said.

Connie let out a cheerless breath and rested her forehead against her fingertips.

Don’t you have to have a licence or something to perform an exorcism? Zeus asked.

Connie raised her head again. How am I supposed to know? she said. I’d already left home by then. All I know is, Mom had a degree in counselling psychology and was running a Christian practice, so I guess she was attracting clients with certain kinds of problems. I don’t think she woke up one day and said, hmm, today I think I’m going to specialize in exorcisms.

In the end, what she was doing wasn’t all that different from Freudian psychoanalysis, Hannah said. Only, if you happen to be a Christian, like our mom, then you turn it into a religious phenomenon. If it’s evil, it must have something to do with the devil and demons.

Apparently, Zeus said, where they live now, it’s got the highest ratio of Satan worshippers per capita in all of North America.

What, in Victoria? Connie said.

Zeus nodded. It’s a statistic. I read it somewhere on the internet. A lot of cats go missing there just before Halloween.

Hannah shook her head at this.

Connie looked nonplussed. So you don’t believe any of that stuff is real?

I didn’t know
what
to believe. The point is, Zeus said, at the time, no one was explaining anything to me.

It’s called the confidentiality agreement, Hannah said.

But she
did
encounter demons, Connie said.

Her experiences were very compelling, Hannah said, but I’m not sure I’d be as quick to interpret the scratches on somebody’s back as the work of a demon.

But what if those scratches were made in a way that would’ve been impossible to inflict on yourself? I don’t doubt Mom’s stories, Connie said loyally.

They could still have been self-inflicted, Hannah said. There are more reasonable explanations than demons.

Connie made an exasperated noise as the woman with the young girl pulled her daughter past their table, making their way out of the restaurant.

Look, all I’m saying is –

The fact is you’re trying to discredit her!

She’s my mom! Hannah said. I’m trying not to be totally freaked out about what it is she used to do.

For what it’s worth, I think it used to freak her out too, Zeus said. She used to say she didn’t really know what she was doing.

Connie was spinning the salt shaker on the table. For a moment, it was the only noise in the restaurant. Remember those home movies? she said to Hannah.

Yeah, Hannah said. We have about twenty minutes of Super 8 family footage, she told Zeus. But I’m not in any of it. They must have run out of film by the time I was born.

Our mom is like a colt, or something, in those films, Connie said. She’s in her early twenties. Sort of awkward and
long-limbed but full of energy and mischief. There’s a lightness there.

She was really beautiful, Hannah said.

Thing is, she keeps hiding from the camera.

I
know
! Hannah said.

I want her to just stop being so insecure, for just one moment, so I can have a good look at her. For
myself
. To know who I come from.

There must be a connection, Hannah said, between that kind of insecurity and her need to help other people. She’s dedicated her whole life to it.

It sounds like she’s made it her business to be a rescuer, Zeus said, because she’s always been at risk of getting lost herself. Remember that Bible verse she had in a frame on her desk? I read it so many times I still know it by heart.
And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday
.

The waitress came over, cleared their plates and returned with the bill, and none of them had made a move or said anything. Above the restaurant, a flock of geese was flying south for the winter, their honking audible from inside.

You know, Hannah said, putting her hand on Zeus’s arm. I know we haven’t been in touch over the years, but I used to wonder how you were doing. I don’t know why we never tried to contact you, not properly, and I’m really sorry about that. You were our brother and we really kind of failed you, and there was this weird, I don’t know, silence in the family. Hannah made eye contact with Connie.