The Divine Economy of Salvation (35 page)

A woman stood directly on the threshold of our house, her auburn hair pinned on top of her head in a swirl, her makeup on thick, caking between the lines in her face. She wasn't unattractive, her eyes large and hazel, framed by black mascara and blue eye shadow, but her entire demeanour was one of exaggeration. Her face displayed an openness that startled me. She wore a purple dress with large sleeves and a black belt at the waist. Her skirt fanned out generously in front of her.

“Who are you?” I asked, suddenly fearful we had come to the wrong house or, because of my mother's death, the house had been sold overnight and these new people were using our things, sleeping in Mother's bed, and eating our food.

“I'm your Aunt Heather,” she replied, taking Sister Marguerite's hand and then hugging her, burrowing her auburn hair
into Sister Marguerite's shoulder. Sister Marguerite's stance held firm but she accepted the embrace. “Joseph's sister, from England.”

Sister Marguerite turned to me as if for confirmation. I shrugged, dropping my book on the doorstep, irritated underneath my coat by the black wool skirt I was wearing, eager to find refuge from the cold, but unable to get past this woman who stood in my way. I didn't care who she was.

“You must be Angela,” she said, cornering me next for a hug, but I pressed myself close to Sister Marguerite's side, distressed to touch a relative I'd barely heard of and had never met. She seemed hurt but smiled at Sister Marguerite apologetically, rubbing her elbows in the chill of the open door. Sister Marguerite pinched my arm and gave me a stern look of disapproval at my impoliteness. She was letting me go. I dropped my hand from her side to enter the house.

“Hello, Aunt Heather,” I said. “My mother's dead.”

AFTER MY APPOINTMENT WITH
Sister Ursula, I run into Kim. She waits by my room, I gather, to reconcile after our exchange in the orchard. I've been avoiding her for a week, and though I don't mean to hold a grudge, I find that I do. When the Sisters meet at Mass or in the common room or the cafeteria, I make sure to lodge myself between them so Kim cannot sit with me. But I keep an eye on her. I want her to know she's hurt me and to judge whether she's hurting too.

Flustered, I am ashamed at my pettiness when I see Kim waiting there, her body slouched as she sits with her knees up against my door. Kim's presence here is ill-timed. I am reminded of my youth as if it were a flag waving over me. As Kim's young face looks up, I could be easily convinced I am standing in a hallway at St. X. School for Girls and she is quietly waiting for one of her young friends. With her hands against her cheeks, holding her chin up, she could be daydreaming about boys and dances, mentally calculating whether she has enough money to buy magazines in the Market. She's even wearing a blue cardigan, torn at the elbows,
similar to the style we wore then as uniforms. One uniform for another. This is what I've accomplished.

I have just returned from Sister Irene's room. She was more lucid than normal and showed me she could hold the can containing her liquid meal by herself with her one good hand. She was straining, but she did keep the can up. Her fingers gripped the rim while the working side of her face spoke of victory. She even gave me a gift.

Sister Irene has come to the point where she is giving away her few possessions. If you walk by her room when the door is open, she'll scream as best as she is able with her partly numb mouth, then point at an object until you leave with it. When I went to see her this afternoon and read to her the Psalm
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want,
she waved her middle finger jaggedly in the air. I didn't notice at first where she was pointing, because I was reading the lines she likes best as she attempted a smile, her head bent to her aching shoulder.
I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.
Her skin has moved past its yellow hue to a dull brown. She is unable to wash her face without help, so I held a cool cloth to her forehead, wiped spittle from her chin, crumbled crackers into a bowl until they turned to dust. She likes to lick the salt.

She focussed on the typewriter, the same one I use when she needs to send letters. I suppose she thinks all her letters have been sent. It looks like an antique, although any typewriter must now be antique. But this one is made of metal, with the arms of each of the keys visible. I helped her after her initial stroke, when she wanted to inform her relatives and friends about her illness and ask them to
come. The only one who heeded her plea was an aunt, so old and thin she could barely climb the two concrete stairs to the door of the convent. I felt little pity for Sister Irene at the time. She had been so critical of everyone, not just in words but in her actions, that I felt she didn't deserve to be remembered. But as I carry the typewriter back to my room, I think otherwise. She deserves to be remembered like anyone else.

And then there is the thing I can't shake from my mind. The keys on her typewriter. All are in working order except for the small
a
; the lower half of the letter does not complete the full loop back up to its curved spine. I typed the alphabet three times on a sheet of paper before leaving Sister Irene's room, demonstrating for her benefit how happy I was to receive this present from her. Each time the small
a
snagged. I hadn't noticed before. When I typed my form letter, I used only capital letters. I typed out my name. I pressed all the other keys. The ribbon is good, black, dark. A single key faulty. This same letter was faulty in my name on the package that brought the candle holder to me.
Who has come for you?
How can it be one of us?

Kim moves with the sound of my shoes on the tiled floor.

“I came to . . . are you all right?” she says, using the wall to support her weight as she gets up. I do not offer her my hand to help, wanting to make it clear I am not pleased with her, but with the heavy typewriter in my hands, I also do not have a hand free.

My knees are sore. I need to sit, and I can't feign the motions of a casual conversation, so I just jut my chin to indicate she should
move away from the door. She complies while I struggle with the door handle. I rush to the dresser, where I rest the typewriter. Kim tenderly inches her face in around the corner.

“Do you need anything? I can get it for you. Sister Ursula says I'm doing much better.”

“I just need to catch my breath,” I tell her and plop on my bed with a sigh.

“Oh.”

She shuffles in, wearing one of the skirts with an elastic waistband that I salvaged from the rummage sale. It's a little large on her, like everything else, but she manages to keep it up by tucking her shirt into it. Her neck is slight, and the oversized clothes make her head appear larger than it is. A round face, like a doll's. The skirt should be hemmed and taken in. I'll direct her to Sister Humilita for the alterations, I think, before realizing she probably doesn't care about her appearance here in front of a bunch of celibate old women anyway. Let her fix it herself. Sister Humilita has enough to do. The old-fashioned wool habits have been replaced with cotton ones, which rip and fade more easily. Yet she makes do with them as long as possible, because it is a sin to waste anything.

“Are you just going to stand there staring at me?” I say, petulantly resentful. I'm worried about who she's been talking to, unwittingly perhaps exposing me to further scrutiny.

“I wanted to apologize,” she says in a half-convinced voice as she shuts the door behind her and walks over to the bed. I don't move to make room for her to sit with me, although she could if she wanted to squeeze in close.

“Don't worry about it,” I tell her. “I've long forgotten about it.”

“Oh.”

I've hurt her feelings now. Well, she hurt mine, I tell myself. Does she expect us all to spend twenty-four hours a day on her case? Does she think we have no one else to think about, no problems of our own? I'm exhausted by her ignorance. By her need for us to help her, save her. I want her to understand she is just one of many in this world whom we are meant to protect. She's nothing special. And if she doesn't appreciate us, we can find others who do.

“Look,” I tell her, “I'm not feeling well. I need to rest.”

Her hands are shaking. She has cupped them together in a handshake behind her back.

“Why don't you go see Sister Josie or Sister Sarah? Sister Bernadette? They're always willing to listen to a good story—aren't they?”

Kim doesn't respond to my comment, perhaps because there is no response. She hasn't had much experience conversing with adults, and she acts as if she hasn't heard me at all. She begins to admire the picture of Christine and me in the frame on my dresser. She ignores the candle holder and the typewriter. They don't seem to have any significance to her. In my mind, I tick off a point in her favour.

“You must miss your sister sometimes,” she says, squinting for a closer view.

“I should.”

Kim is in profile, but I can tell she's struggling to ask me something. Her mouth opens and closes and opens again. The tip of her tongue peeks out the side of her lips and retreats inside. Meanwhile,
I rub my forehead to fight off a headache I know will be full-blown by the end of the evening.

“I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do . . . when I leave here.” Her hand lingers on the oak wood of the dresser.

“That's good. It's about time you made plans.”

She takes her scolding well, nodding submissively. “I just still can't decide anything. I don't know where I should go or if I should keep the baby. I don't want to be another mother on welfare who does nothing and is nobody.”

“Don't you think that's going to depend on you?” I ask her. “I mean, that's why welfare's there—if you need it.”

“But I don't want to take welfare,” she says, covering her face with her hands and starting to sob. “I don't want to bring up a kid and just be poor. Just get by. I don't want to have to do it by myself.”

Kim lifts her head and stares at the wall behind my dresser as if it were a mirror. She has begun to envision her future. It isn't a bright one, and I don't know if I should contradict her. She's fifteen, after all, and if she does keep her baby, what would she be able to offer him or her? The kind of life she doesn't want and it will resent, most probably. A life of counting pennies, of hardship, of hunger. Without an education, what would she be able to do? I cannot speak of these things with her, because suffering and poverty are accepted virtues within our walls. Yet, the only reason Mr. Q. hasn't forced her into school is because her parents don't want her back and Sister Ursula recommended she stay out until the end of her term. But what then? Certainly mothers have brought up children at sixteen before, but in today's age? Without
a man? She's close enough to sixteen she won't be forced to give it away. She needs to decide.

“You could give it up,” I say softly.

She shakes her head and turns around, meeting my eyes as I slide my hips to the end of the bed to give her room if she wants to sit. Her cheeks are wet, her olive face flushed pink. “I can't. I can't. I can't bring it into this world if I'm not going to take care of it. I can't.”

“Then what, dear?”

She hoists her arms up over her head, her hands in two tight fists in a motion to bear down upon her belly. They fall like hammers. I let out a cry just as her fingers unravel before striking her own flesh.

She collapses on the bed and forces herself into my embrace. I hug her tightly, yet try not to apply too much pressure, not wishing to harm the baby, as I believed she wished to harm it. I know from my own teenage years that girls get ideas into their heads in such situations. Ride bicycles or use turkey basters, jump down flights of stairs or drink bottles of whisky. She's probably heard of other ways. She may be seven months pregnant and the clinics won't take her, but someone will. There's always someone willing to say they'll save you.

“Listen to me,” I say, my voice cracking, unable to hold back the sorrow within me. “You can't do that. You can't think like that. You need to be brave.”

I want to cup her jaw in my hands, force her to listen. She folds in my arms, the lingering smell of her morning shampoo
in my face. I curl my hands around her until she decides to break free.

“I'm so sorry,” she cries. “I'm so sorry. You're not feeling well and I shouldn't be here.”

She's being sincere and I wonder how awful I must look to make her afraid for my health in her own distress. She must have heard about the wine from one of the Sisters. Maybe even Sister Ursula. I grip her wrists with my hands. They are delicate, like twigs. Her eyes, a muddy brown, are deeply set, the bottom rims edged with a row of tears.

“I hate my baby. I hate it. I wish it wasn't going to be born.”

“Don't say that,” I say strongly. “Don't you dare curse a life like that.”

She tries to rise from the bed, but I hold her with the little strength I have left. My whole head is pounding and the room has turned into a cave, where we have little light and only each other.

“You see, Kim,” I begin as she calms enough to listen to me and fumbles in her shirt pocket to produce a tissue. “I've been upset because of an anniversary. An anniversary of someone's death.”

I cannot continue. The words stick like hair in a drain. Refuse to be extracted.

“Your mother?”

“My mother? No, not my mother. Not just my mother.” But I'm surprised she knows. The Sisters have shared more with her than I imagined. I didn't even realize they knew the depth of that grief in me. I didn't know they thought it worthy of mention. For a few years after entering the convent, I could been seen crying on her
birthday and on the anniversary of her death, but after that my grief was bound to this room, within these walls, where I believed no one could hear me. Has anyone been down here listening? Visiting my mother's grave once a year ought not to cause this kind of talk. But then there was Christine's visit, and they must know it will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of my mother's death soon. Our faith is big on anniversaries. Our faith is also big on suffering. And I know since I've spent nights with my ear pressed against the doors of other rooms, I shouldn't assume no one has listened at mine. Maybe Kim herself has. She doesn't make much noise when she walks and likes to go about in bare feet. Last week, when the air was warmer, I saw them outside my window. Square toes, blunt. The wet snow between them.