Sweet Jesus (4 page)

It
is
a miracle.

I’ve just had my doubts, you know? I mean, maybe we’ve got it all wrong, Mary-Beth. Maybe life is just a brutal rat race to succeed, after all, without higher purpose or redemption, and I’ve just dragged three more unsuspecting victims into the fray.

I think your fears are wildly exaggerated, Mary-Beth said, and need a little dose of reality.

I’m up to my eyeballs in reality, Connie said. What I need is a dose of the mystical.

Mary-Beth put her plate down, wiped her mouth, and tucked her feet up onto the couch. I fear, she said, that our evangelical Anglican isn’t getting enough Pentecostal on her Sunday mornings.

Just
something
to bolster my faith, Connie said, looking baffled and resigned.

Mary-Beth picked up the remote and pointed it at the
TV
. When’s the debate supposed to come on again? she asked and started blinking through the channels.

In about fifteen minutes, Connie said and stared at her watch longer than it took to tell the time. She realized, at that moment, that she could imagine a life in which she had no faith.

There had been a period in her youth when she’d lost her focus, turned her eyes away from God. Her parents never knew, it wasn’t radical, but she’d had a quiet rebellion. At seventeen, she had a boyfriend. They’d done cocaine. Connie thought about it now – it didn’t make her cringe, she wasn’t ashamed – two tiny white envelopes in a small ziplock bag hidden among her underclothes. Her younger sister had found it one day. How triumphant and betrayed Hannah had looked, brandishing the bag like some proof of heresy, grateful for once of being spared the burden of being bad, but hurt too, by the exclusion of Connie’s secrecy. Hannah had acted as if she took Connie’s privacy as an indictment of her own character, and it pained Connie to know that this might have been true. She felt her sister wasn’t to be trusted. She was too moody, and prone to bouts of anger that left everyone in its wake toppled like palm trees after a hurricane. In fact, Connie had, on more than one occasion, thanked God explicitly for not endowing her
with Hannah’s temperament and her ambiguous, unreligious life. It seemed chaotic and unhappy to her.

They’d been raised Christian, and Connie had never really strayed. Her faith was an inheritance from her parents, but she’d also made it her own by a decision of intellect. She’d decided to believe in Christ’s message. It struck her as truthful and it suited her. Connie had been married for nine years. If someone asked her, are you happy? she would probably respond that happiness is not the point. The point is to live in accordance with God’s will, and by the fruit of your actions will you be judged. Only then do you reap the rewards, and so far – Connie couldn’t help but think – things were looking pretty good in that respect.

She had always wanted a view of the ocean and now there it was, right outside her window. At the bottom of the sloping landscaped lawn, you took a narrow path of red-brown wood chips through the rhododendrons to a grey pebble beach upon whose shores lapped the cold waters of the Pacific. Her husband, Harlan Foster, had bought her this house. It had been built by a highly sought-after Vancouver architect, on a hectare of oceanfront property, for a man whose marriage collapsed before he and his wife had a chance to move in. The price was more than Harlan thought they could afford, but Connie was thrilled. The house had a state-of-the-art kitchen, two stone fireplaces – one in the living room, one in the split-level family room – and the dining room had a vaulted cathedral ceiling with a chandelier four feet across. There were six bedrooms, four bathrooms, two ensuites with jacuzzi tubs, a finished basement with a snooker table, and a three-car garage.

At least my husband’s a good provider, Connie said, almost to herself, as if Mary-Beth wasn’t there.

That must make you feel safe.

Well, sometimes it makes me feel like we’re on the right track.

Though I don’t think the Midas touch ever saved a soul, Mary-Beth said. Harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter.

Yes, yes, I know, Connie said. It’s moral scrupulousness that ensures the resurrection of the flesh.

That and a good skin-care regime, Mary-Beth joked. I’m using straight olive oil now. Apparently it’s the new fountain of youth.

Earlier, Connie said wistfully, the ocean was the colour of olive oil. The sun came out just as it was setting. The clouds were purple and pink and orange. There was a hawk sitting at the top of a tree. Maybe a hundred feet up. White breast with a grey back. Just sitting up there and swivelling its head around. How suddenly the air changes when the sun goes down at this time of year. I felt the chill and melancholy of it. The maples were still wet from the rain and black. Just a handful of yellow leaves hanging from their branches like paper stars. Do you know what they reminded me of?

I know you’ll tell me, Mary-Beth said, wincing slightly at Connie’s morbid tone.

The yellow stars the Jews were forced to wear, and Mary-Beth shook her head sorrowfully.

Connie told her how she’d been to Dachau when she was twelve years old, as a tourist on a family trip to Europe. Her parents had taken her there. She’d held her sister’s hand and they’d walked through the white enamel shower rooms and saw the ovens and watched the black-and-white film footage of rooms piled to the ceiling with glasses, leather shoes, dark wool coats. The piles sloped down from the highest point like grain in a silo, as if poured from above and not accumulated
from the floor up. That night, Connie had woken up on the floor of a French hotel scared stiff. She’d seen Nazis under the bed where her parents lay sleeping. They were crouched there with their black stovepipe boots in their hands. Her fear was visceral. It had circled the rug and settled in for good, resting at the centre of things ever since. Connie got so used to her fear she forgot what had caused it in the first place. It was company. She mistook it for truth.

Sometimes I think you’re half in love with the idea of disaster, Mary-Beth said, but I’m not sure why. Look, she said, suddenly pointing with the remote. They’re doing some kind of follow-up story on that awful incident again.

Four years ago, a man on a Greyhound bus had stabbed a fellow passenger – a young man asleep with his headphones on. The guy was schizophrenic. He hacked the young man’s head off with a knife and held it up by the hair to taunt the other passengers, who’d all fled the bus and were standing outside on the edge of a dark highway. In the rush to get off, a mother had thrown her toddler over several rows of seats to get her away from him. Then the man on the bus started cutting up his victim’s body with a pair of scissors and eating it.

I can’t even begin to comprehend, Connie said. How long ago was it that she’d seen that al-Qaeda footage of a hostage on his knees in an orange jumpsuit? A man in a black hood standing above him. A large knife is raised into the air. These televised beheadings, direct from Baghdad, birthplace of the ancient world – such a biblical place. Birthplace of a whole new style of crime.

The depth of misery, Mary-Beth said, that could drive a person to such a thing.

Why can’t people learn to control themselves! Connie slapped the empty plates back on the tray and stood up. I mean,
people everywhere just seem to be giving into their own worst natures. There’s no restraint. We’re not animals, you know. We can’t just go around doing whatever the frig we like.

Mary-Beth glanced up from the
TV
to give Connie a sympathetic look. Connie’s occasional outbursts of muted profanity encouraged her. As she’d once told her, they were a reassuring sign of defiance in an otherwise obedient life.

Whatever happened, Connie said with regained composure, to the private interior reward of virtue?

The private interior reward of virtue? Mary-Beth repeated.

Well, you know what I mean, Connie said and carried the tray out to the kitchen.

Connie ran the hot water and squeezed some lavender dish soap into the sink. She didn’t mind washing the dishes because a frugal upbringing had taught her to spare the appliances. Besides, it was an excuse to warm her hands. Connie held her wrists under the warm flow from the tap and prayed.
Oh God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father – and from whom all good things flow
.

Sometimes a string of religious words would pearl through Connie’s mind, like beads dragged through her fingers. It wasn’t quite prayer, it was too unbidden, and it made her a little nervous, but she dearly loved the sound of the words she heard in church and so her mind poured them forth, only she knew on these occasions it was out of a love of their sound and not their meaning. Sometimes she wished she had Mary-Beth’s fearless evangelical faith. They had run the Vancouver halfmarathon together last spring, and the night before, Mary-Beth had had a vision and felt called to testify. To the back of her t-shirt, under her runner’s number, she’d pinned a handwritten
sign –
Jesus is my Coach, I am running with my Saviour, to the finish line
.

Connie was cautious, however, that these proclamations should be uttered in a spirit of absolute sincerity. Faith without vigilance made you an easy target for hypocrisy. The devil will want to get you, Connie’s parish priest had once told her, because your parents are such Godly people. He will want to win you over to his camp. And Connie had understood that there was a power to be harnessed in God’s name, that it required a reverence and a sanctity. It was something she admired about the Jews and the Muslims, how they refused to spell out the names of their gods in full. The way the Muslims wove flaws into their carpets so they wouldn’t be committing idolatry or mimicking God’s perfection on earth.

The floodlights came on outside, giving the reflection in the dark window above the sink an eerie depth, at exactly the same moment Mary-Beth yelled from the living room, It’s on! The sudden interruption gave Connie’s body a jolt. She answered, Coming! and wondered why these kinds of collisions seemed to happen so often. It was like being jolted out of sleep by a noise that coincides with a dream, the way a car on the street can squeal at the very moment someone taps you on the shoulder in a dream. Connie looked at the clock. Her husband should’ve been home by now. Where are you, Harlan?

Connie dried her hands and left the kitchen. She leaned through the French doors into the living room. I’m just going to go check on the kids.

Okay, Mary-Beth said without turning away from the
TV
. It’s just the preliminaries. You haven’t missed anything yet.

Connie went upstairs and looked into Emma’s bedroom – her eldest at eight years old, mouth open, hair like caramel sauce. A storybook was jammed between her mattress and the
headboard. Connie carefully pulled it out like a sliver, then put the book back on the shelf and went into Theo’s room. He lay on top of his covers like a starfish, with his head at the foot of the bed. She could hear the surrender in his breathing, his complete trust in the moment. She picked him up, turned him around, and tucked him in again. She went into Simon’s room across the hall. Si was six years old, three years older than Theo, and he lay curled up on his side with his arms around a soft, black, stuffed gorilla. Connie sat down and touched his warm head. She tucked the covers around his body and stroked his dark hair. His cheeks glowed pink in the light from the hall, like sunlight through magnolia petals. Connie felt the sharp pangs of love. How blessed I am in my children, she thought and walked into her own room – she felt expansive, more free in her own house now that her friend was over – and sat down on the edge of the bed, the bed in which all three of her children had been conceived. Maybe one had been made on the sofa, or in a sleeping bag on a camping trip, but mainly she and Harlan restricted their lovemaking to the queen-sized bed they’d bought after their honeymoon nine years ago, with money Harlan made from the sale of his first patent.

Harlan Douglas Foster. As reliable a husband as Connie could have ever hoped for. He had a master’s in engineering from
UBC
and ran his own security systems company, sold mostly household burglar alarms. He specialized in security, and the symbolism was not lost on either of them. It was something they both wanted, especially while their children were young.

Once the kids get past their vulnerable stage, Harlan was fond of saying to guests at dinner parties, then we’ll encourage a healthy curiosity in the opportunities that life might present. Adventure is a concept we want to encourage, he’d
say, but only in its potential to offer wholesome, character-building experiences.

Both of them valued the lessons to be learned from a physical challenge, and Harlan especially was an avid outdoorsman. They were the kind of people who took their children camping and sailing and hiking and biking. Once, Connie had even jumped out of a plane, but that was before she was married, and although she would never consider doing it again, it was exhilarating at the time.

There was something reckless about falling in love too. She had met Harlan when her doorbell broke. She’d taken a summer job at a plant nursery outside Mill Bay and was living in an apartment at the top of a large house with a steep interior staircase that led up to her door. Connie unscrewed the buzzer next to the door and gathered up all the wire that ran to the heavy black receiver at the top of the stairs. She put it all in a cardboard box and took it to a store on the highway she must have noticed unconsciously because now she knew where to go – Home Protection Plus. A cheerful electronic ding-ding sounded as she walked through the door and Connie felt she’d come to the right place.

Harlan Foster was in the work area when his assistant came back and told him there was a woman at the counter with a broken doorbell. Should I tell her to go to Canadian Tire?

What’s wrong with it? Harlan asked.

Well, it’s busted, the assistant said. I don’t know, we don’t do doorbells.