The Divine Economy of Salvation (3 page)

“Daddy, do you know where this new house is?” I asked, while Christine busily pointed to a row of pine trees along the roadside.

“Look at them, they're all so small!” she cried. The ones on our old property were three times the size and could only be decorated outside at Christmas, being far too large to fit in our living room.

“Of course I do,” Father assured me. “Can you girls just relax and let me alone 'til we get there? Please,” he added, feeling my mother's forehead beside him for temperature. “Your mother needs her sleep.”

“She's always sleeping,” Christine muttered, pressing her hand against the window, outlining the dusty print it made with her fingers.

“Shut up,” I told her.

“You're no better, always moping around. Can't anyone have some fun?” She leaned forward, jutting her head into the front of the van. “Can't we have some fun, Daddy?”

My father reached back with his right hand and ruffled the bangs of her hair. He was probably at the end of his tether, but he adjusted the rear-view mirror to offer us both a sympathetic smile
and then started the engine again. “Soon, Sweetheart. Let Daddy drive now.”

Christine leaned back into her seat and, astonishingly, was asleep within minutes. I always envied her ability to meld into her surroundings, no matter how foreign or strange. Her ability to adapt. My eyes remained open the whole trip, keeping watch over Mother's breath, Father's erratic driving, the scenery passing us, as if I might be able to find my way back if needed. Reflected in the window, my face was as grave as the dark pines we were passing. I did not like this city, this new house, before we ever arrived. The air, thick like gas, and the smell of burning pulp from the paper mills in the town we had driven through just a half-hour earlier had left me nauseated. The city's being rose up like an animal out of a hole.
How does it breathe
, I wondered,
under all this dirt?
Then it started to rain.

Ashbrook Crescent, a street with grey concrete curves that wound around the houses as if protecting the lights in living rooms with drawn curtains, possessed humble homes with one-door garages and short, stubby driveways, almost all split-level bungalows made of red or grey brick, townhouses, split into two. The autumn foliage was the only hint of nature's stubborn intrusion. The windows were untrimmed, the backyards hidden by fences, the front entrances ornamented modestly with dried cornhusks or wooden plaques. Three streets earlier a park with a miniature baseball diamond and a neglected plastic playground had stood vacant, with crossing signs that read “Watch Out for Children,” though none were playing there, and I didn't see any on the streets as we drove.
Not a single person was outside when we arrived. Our new street, though worn with age, had the appearance of being temporarily erected, a place to recuperate between moves, not a place to move to.

When our new home came into view, with the fresh rain slipping down the windows, I saw it first like that, as though through a veil of tears. From that moment on, I think my own eyes took on the vision of that glass, with single-second moments of clarity, but mostly a view lacking in focus, causing me to venture with caution. We had a corner lot near the end of the winding road. Obviously the bungalow had been abandoned quickly: cardboard boxes on the curb, many of the window shutters open, a single porch light at the entrance hanging in vigil, the scuff marks on the red bricks exposed. The street numbers painted in gold, however, were apparently new, and glittered against the peeled skins of the plaster and stone. The number 40, the exact age of my mother, hung oddly unattached, removable like the plastic ones we had pressed into her birthday cake two months earlier. Christine had blown out the candles for her.

After my father and I got out of the car, shielding the rain from our heads with our hands, we helped lift my mother out of the front seat. She had lost weight over the last year, had become brittle in her bones, and the slightest bump or nudge left bruises on her skin. Three days before we finished packing, she'd stumbled on a stair and hit the banister. A purple bruise, the shape of a plum, was still visible on her arm. Christine, who had woken up when we stopped, jumped along the driveway, her feet splashing in and out of puddles, her coat, flattened from the long trip, flying open and
rising in the wind. She was eager to open the locked front door, and pulled at the handle.

“Stop her, Joseph, she might get sick,” my mother feebly managed as my father covered her with his jacket, his white shirt plastered from the rain, curly brown chest hairs tight against the thin fabric. He moved like a man delivering a fragile package, with short steps, her body held up in his arms. My father too had transformed over the last year, his hair a shade darker from store-bought dye, his face pinched, his torso firm. His body was so taut it appeared to be conserving space. At the top step, he pointed to the mailbox, where Christine found the key in an envelope soaked with rain.

I was in charge of bringing in the sleeping bags. Our first night at 40 Ashbrook Crescent would be spent in the living room, the small brick fireplace burning damp wood and crinkled newspaper, the thermostats defrosting after having been shut down for a couple of days. The floor was orange-brown, carpeted, and dusty. Mother spent most of the night coughing, keeping us half-awake. The previous owners had left various things in the home: a plastic table in the kitchen, mismatched bowls and cutlery, a broom in the linen closet, an end table, a painting of a sailboat left crookedly attached to a nail in the living room, a pail under the kitchen sink, and a couch with a large stain and an offensive odour that Father had to drag outside to the curb with the rest of the garbage before we could sleep. I noticed nervously as we unrolled the sleeping bags that there were only two bedrooms and one bathroom off the hallway adjacent to the living room and kitchen doors. There weren't enough rooms for us to live as we had before; I didn't want to share
a bedroom with Christine. My sister slept curled up in a ball, my father's face close to hers, my mother's angled towards the hallway. I resigned myself to the corner, near a single window slapped with rain, asking myself dumbly what this place would offer me, counting the half-dying embers of the fire.

It was two days later that I was told about St. X. School for Girls. My mother had since been put up in the larger of the two bedrooms on a fold-out cot made comfortable by unmatched sheets and blankets, her dry face peeking out amidst the colours, her short hair flattened to her scalp with bobby pins. Her usual pitcher of water sat on the carpeted floor. We had made sure to keep it handy in the van for when we arrived. I knelt beside her while my father, who had made the arrangements, spoke to Christine in the kitchen. I had already grown weary that no attempt had been made to set up the other bedroom, and no one had mentioned who was to sleep there. Father had filled it with unopened boxes while the three of us continued to sleep in our bags in the living room.

“You will have your own room there,” my mother told me calmly. “And your father's new work will be taking up too much time, and you know I can't get around like before.”

Her breath was laboured, wheezing in and out like an old fan, her lips chapped, matching the white creases on her forehead and cheeks. She sweated continually, the mildest movement, however delicate, acting against the desire of her body to keep still. “At least it isn't her mind,” I overheard Father say to a nurse at the clinic we had visited in the nearest city to our old home. The nurse nodded
back, squeezing his arm comfortingly, and exited the room to escort an older man with a cane in for tests. My mother was too young for such a place, I thought, the room filled with grey hair and wrinkled faces, signs in large print. Yet, relegated to her cot, she did seem old in her body, and I wasn't sure she wouldn't have preferred to trade a little of her mind for a piece of her younger body back. She was slowly being erased. I feared if I left her, she would simply disappear.

“I could help out here, Mommy, please.” I held her hand in mine, tracing her knuckles, the fine bones delicate as the beads in her rosary she kept beside her pillow, a plain silver chain with tiny white beads, the silent companion of her hours, a Confirmation gift from the nuns she had lived with in Ireland when she was a girl. The Sisters of Mercy. They had taken her in as a toddler after her parents were killed in an automobile accident. The grandparents had disowned her mother for marrying a Northerner. However, she had been baptized and the nuns welcomed the young girl. “They were strict women,” my mother told me. “But they did good work. They saved me from a destitute life. They gave me a sound education and moral values. I owe them more than I can ever repay.”

“No, God will watch over me, Angela. You must have faith in Him. You must get an education. The school is very good, well worth the money—”

“It's too expensive,” I begged. “Daddy hasn't sold all the woodwork yet. I heard him—”

“That's not your concern,” she replied sternly, taking a deep breath, the air struggling into her lungs as she removed her hand
from mine and motioned to the window. I rose and opened it. A gust of wind shoved itself against my neck.

“You be a good girl for your mother. I'm too tired to argue with you,” she added, as if she were the one defeated in our argument. “It isn't far and we'll see you on weekends when your father is home. It'll be like the school I went to when I was a young girl. It will be an important time in your life, Angela. Trust me.”

I gave up and stopped listening to their reasons for sending us to private Catholic boarding schools. I stared through the window at the flowerpots filled with the week's rain, a hummingbird ornament dipping its wings in and out of the water in monotonous thirst. Christine would be enrolled at an elementary school closer to the house, and I would be enrolled in one downtown for junior girls. We had never been to separate schools before, and I heard Christine slam the back door, my father running after her, trying to calm her down. After a time, my mother took off her rose-coloured glasses, rubbed at her reddened eyes, and slept, her breath so barely noticeable she could have been mistaken for dead. My face turned to our new backyard, to that nailed-down hummingbird, I almost wished she were, and I could go back to our old home, my old bed, back to the life we had been living. But then I realized if my mother were dead, I'd never be beside her again, and my shame at the thought of her unburdening us of this place made me bite back tears. I tucked her blankets underneath her chin and went to ask Father when Christine and I would be leaving and what we would need to bring with us. Luckily, we had not unpacked.

The following evening we joined together for a parting dinner, a scarce affair since we had made only a quick trip to the grocery store, but we ate a cooked ham and corn and savoured small, bell-shaped dark baking chocolates, my mother's favourite treat, for dessert. Christine and I sat with Mother by the fireplace and listened to the radio after packing up a few of our clothes and bathroom supplies. Father would drive Christine in the morning and, to save time, I'd be taking the bus downtown, the route map passed into my hands, underlined in blue ink, about an hour's trip with stops from Ashbrook Crescent. I was to ask the bus driver to announce my stop and enter the grey stone building, part convent and part school, and ask for the Mother Superior. “She's the head nun, the one in charge,” my mother instructed me. “They have a lot on their minds, organizing everything, so don't be upset if she doesn't spend much time with you. You'll meet the girls your own age soon enough.” As the night crept up on us, the autumn air filled with the scent of pine, my mother asked us to pray, her head bent, her rose-coloured glasses reflecting the flames.

“Let us thank God for all His blessings. Watch over these children, and bring them into Your grace. Amen.” When she lifted her head, she was smiling with a vividness unseen in the past few months, her eyes turned towards Christine and me with hope. I was about to return her humble amen with one of mine until I noticed the shadow of my father in the doorway, large and fumbling, backing away from us to grapple with our luggage in the semi-darkness. He bowed his head in a gesture that I can now, after years of observation, recognize as despair.

When I left my sleeping bag that night to get a glass of water from the bathroom, I heard his voice through the white walls.

“You're not going to die on me,” he said.

I was shocked by his words. I realized my mother was ill, but death had never crossed my mind as a real possibility, only a childish fantasy. The sounds of crying seeped through the wall, but it was my mother who was crying, whimpering like an injured animal, and not my father.

“What am I being punished for?” she asked him. “What did I do?”

These were the only words of doubt I had ever heard from her; she was to me a pillar of faith, reading the Bible, reciting her rosary, and humbly thankful for every morning when she woke. She had given me a faux-gold locket with her picture inside, a photograph taken just after she was married, her face strong and clear of lines, her eyes confidently turned to the camera. I am in her belly at this time, although the picture doesn't show it, and her face, even in a black-and-white photograph, seems to glow with a secret serenity. There is freshness to both her appearance and the angle of the shot, as if she had been caught off guard enjoying herself in the summer season. I couldn't believe the woman on the other side of the wall was the same person who had played with me outside—running through the fields with her skirt in her hands, stepping through mud—cooked elaborate dinners, and kept house. My ear against the wall, I briefly sensed movement underneath the plaster. The new house seemed to sigh, letting go of us all. I took my glass of water back to the living room and wrapped myself tightly in my sleeping
bag. I remembered how we had discovered a nest of robins in our maple tree back home and gone to visit them each day, offering seeds, monitoring their growth. Christine once even brought out an umbrella to cover them in the rain. Then one weekend, the mother disappeared. Father told us our attentions might have disrupted the natural order of things. The tiny scared bodies, lifting their blind eyes up to an absent beak, huddled together for warmth. Brothers and sisters fought, pecking each other and drawing blood to get near the one most equipped to survive. The weakest, not able to make his way to the warmth and food, died, and we buried him beside the tree under the soil. The following morning, a hole was left in its place, another animal probably having dug it up for food. I decided that at St. X. School for Girls, I would need to find a new family to survive the season, curl up next to the one who seemed the strongest.