The Patron Saint of Liars (37 page)

I'd been good through all of this. Ever since my father said go, I'd done this whole thing and held it together and been okay, but now all of that was gone. I didn't want to be the one to have seen him hurt. It should have been her. She should have been the one who was there. I wanted to know exactly where she got off telling me that I'd done anything wrong. "Don't you tell me what I can and can't do," I said, trying to keep my voice down. "You can't be gone all the time and then waltz in here like you're somebody's mother and tell me what I'm allowed to do."

"Watch your tone," my mother said, holding her voice as even as Mother Corinne's.

"No," I said. I took a step toward her. "Think about it. What if I hadn't been there? How many days do you think he would have been lying on the porch before you noticed he was missing? How long would Dad have been dead before you swung by the house to say you needed a light bulb changed and so you wanted him to come by?"

My mother stared at me, her cheeks flushing, and right then I wished she'd hit me. I wished she cared enough for once to just do something.

"I'm going back to see your father," Rose said, turning away.

"I'm sure he'd love that," I said.

I watched her walk away from me and wished my eyes could burn holes in her back. You'd have thought that enough had happened for one day without having my mother decide to play responsible family member. It was one thing to put up with her endless indifference, but to have her act like she actually gave a rip since it was convenient to do so was more than I could stand. I sat in my wheelchair and kept my eyes trained on the swinging doors at the end of the hall. Any minute now she'd walk through them and I'd go right up to her and tell her she could go to hell for all I cared. She'd done a rotten job. She had never for a minute put me first. Jesus, look around you, I'd say to her. Saint Elizabeth's is full of girls who can't raise their children. At least they're kind enough to give them away.

My mother came through the doors at a fast clip, put her hand on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, "Your father isn't feeling well so you just pull it together until we get home. No fighting in front of him."

"You're worried about me upsetting Dad?" I said, but she put up her hand to stop me. They were wheeling my father into the hall. He had a thick pad across his forehead and a layer of gauze wrapped around his head. He looked like a war hero, a general, coming home from battle.

"There's my smart girl," Dad said to me. I went to him. I picked up his hand from the armrest and felt better that quick. I had my father. If not my mother, my father.

"You should have seen this one," he said to my mother, and kissed my hand. "She's going to be a nurse. No, she's going to be a doctor. She knew exactly what to do. She was a professional straight through. She even drove up here, can you believe that?"

"She told me," my mother said.

"Cool as a cucumber. I wouldn't have believed it. She didn't get it from her dad, that's for sure. You put me in a crisis like that and I just fall all to pieces. This one's got a real head on her shoulders."

The nurse wheeled us to the front door. "Where's the car?" my mother said.

"Some orderly parked it when we came in." I dropped the keys in her hand and pointed to the far side of the parking lot. "Over there. Somewhere."

My mother wrapped her hand tight around the keys. "Wait here," she said. "I'll just be a minute." Then she headed off into the dark.

"I'm so proud of you, Sissy," my father said.

"You scared me to death." I looked out over the parking lot. It was so quiet out there. No one was coming into the hospital. No one was sick.

"I told the doctor what you did. He said you did everything right. I guess some people are just born knowing things. June was that way." He put his hand on my hip and pressed me against his chair. "You know, this is crazy, but when I hit my head I thought it was June's house I was going to, not just her house, but to June, like she was still there. That's 'cause if a fellow was to hit his head, June would be the most logical person to go to. She was solid, like you are. That's what I was thinking about when the doctor was stitching me up, how much you've turned out to be like June."

I looked down at him. I'd never thought about that. It was a nice thing to say. Nobody was a better person than June. But for some reason it gave me a shiver, too. June was stuck there, like all her niceness wouldn't let her get away.

"Maybe it's because she had you when you were a baby," my father said. "I was against it. I can tell you now that you're older. I thought it should have been your mother taking care of you when you were little. But Rose knew, she knew there was something June had to give you, and she was right. There isn't a person in the world I'd be prouder to see you grow up to be like."

Then my mother drove up in front of us and I held my father's hand while he got up out of the chair. "Let me sit in the back," he said. "I'll get some rest back there."

I waited until he was in the car and then closed the door and went to get up front. My mother kept her eyes straight ahead as she pulled out onto the road.

On the way home we told the story of my father's accident again and again. He told my mother what had happened. I said what I'd thought, about it not being his blood when I first saw him there. My mother looked pale as we went over the details, like maybe the whole thing upset her. But it could have just been that it was dark and she looked whiter against the night sky.

"How many stitches did you get?" my mother asked.

"Fifty-seven," he said. "Can you believe that? They'll be in for two weeks, the doctor said."

I watched her drive. She was so casual about it, the way she only looped one wrist through the bottom of the steering wheel. She watched my father in the rearview mirror while they talked.

"That girl, Lorraine," my father said. "She sure was nice."

"She was a big help. Now she'll probably get in all sorts of trouble for not telling anybody where she was going."

"That's ridiculous," my father said. "I'll talk to Mother Corinne about it. I'll just explain it to her. She'll understand."

"I hope so," I said, looking at my mother's profile against a row of passing streetlights. She had missed dinner. I thought it might have been the first time she'd ever missed fixing a meal at Saint Elizabeth's.

My mother drove us right to our house and parked the car there in front of the stairs. She looked around slowly, taking it all in. She stared down at her feet. The door was wide open. "Good God," she said, walking up the porch steps on her toes.

Dad and I got out of the car and followed her up. I could see now it was blood I had slipped on. It went across everything like a thin coat of paint. It was all exactly as we had left it. Three stained pillows, the dishtowel soaked and red, a glass of water, the chair overturned. "What a mess," my father said.

"Don't worry about it," I told him. "I'll clean it up. It looks a lot worse than it is."

We went inside and my father lay down on the couch. I brought a pillow out of the spare bedroom for his head.

"I'm going to get us something for dinner," my mother said. "Will you be all right while I'm gone?"

My father looked up at her and smiled. "Of course," he said.

"I'm here," I said.

My mother nodded and went back out the door. "Two minutes," she said over her shoulder.

"What are you two fighting about now?" my father said after she'd left.

"We're not fighting."

"Okay," he said, and sighed. "I'm tired enough to just believe you tonight." His eyes flicked down for a second and then back up again. "I may go to sleep for a minute."

"You do that," I said. I pulled an old green afghan that had been June's over him. "I'm going to straighten up some." I leaned over and kissed the top of his head, but he didn't say anything.

I got a bucket of soapy water and a brush from the kitchen, switched on the front porch light, and went outside. It was turning into a nice night, clear and a little cool. I threw the pillows and the towel onto the lawn and got to work on the wood. The blood came up easy, but there was a lot of it. I kept finding new spots every time I thought I'd finished. It made me think about my father, how I would take care of him. This was nothing, but it felt like the start, and I was going to have to figure out how to get ready for it. I wouldn't be getting any help from my mother. You could bet on that.

I was still mad at her, but a little less so. Maybe I was just tired. I wanted to be able to stop hoping that she would turn into something else. I wanted not to want her so much anymore. It was getting old. Every time something happened to make me feel close to her again, even something as stupid as driving lessons, she was always waiting right around the bend with a new way to prove to me how little the whole thing mattered to her. You'd think a person would learn after a while. That's what amazed me about myself. I was so damn slow to learn.

I sat down on the steps for a minute and wiped off my hands on my shorts, which were already about as covered with dirt and blood as a piece of clothing can get and still qualify as fabric. I saw the chair lying on its side and reached over and grabbed a leg to set it right again, when I saw something written underneath it, on the bottom of the seat. "
Merry Christmas to Rose, from your friend, Son. 1968.
"

It was a nice chair. It had been in my mother's house for as long as I could remember. Dad had been stripping the varnish off of it so he could do it over again. I never knew he'd made it. I didn't know it was a present for my mother. I reached under the chair and touched the carved letters. I ran a finger over Christmas, Rose, Son, 1968. I was born in February of 1969. He would have given her this chair just before I was born. But it was signed, your friend, not, your husband, or, with all my love. It was sweet. It was like something my dad would say. He wanted to be her friend more than anything. That's what he was trying to tell her even then.

My mother came up the stairs, her arms full of bags. "Careful," I said. "They're wet."

"Oh," she said, and put the bags down on them anyway. "Where's your father?"

"He's asleep," I nodded back toward the house, "on the couch."

My mother sat down beside me on the stairs. "I didn't realize at first how bad this whole thing was. I thought it was just a little cut." She wrapped her arms around her knees like she was cold. "I talked to Sister Evangeline. I shouldn't have said that about you driving. You had to, I understand that now."

I shrugged and wiped up a spot of blood I'd missed. We were both quiet for a long time. There had always been things I'd wanted to say to my mother, things I'd wanted to know, but I'd been raised by my father who taught me through everything he did that my mother was someone I'd be better off not bothering too much. Sitting there on the porch I just didn't care anymore.

"Why did you move?" I said, looking straight at her.

"Move where?"

I pointed across the field to the little house with no lights on. In the dark it was barely a smudge at the edge of the woods. If you didn't know what you were looking for you'd never be able to see it at all. "Over there. Why don't you live with us?"

"I don't see what this has to do with your father's accident," my mother said flatly.

"It doesn't have anything to do with it, really. I just wanted to know. I've always wanted to know." I thought about it for a minute. "Maybe it does have something to do with it," I said.

My mother looked at me. I could see her thinking it all out, which way to go with this. "That's between your father and me," she said.

I shook my head. "If it was between you and Dad, that would mean that he understood, and if he did he would have told me. No," I said. "I want the real reason."

"It's personal," she said, her voice cooling off like the night.

I wasn't afraid. The day had been too much. I had been so afraid since the moment I saw my father's blood that this seemed like nothing suddenly. It was like finding out that dog you had walked three blocks out of your way to avoid every day of your life had no teeth, and in one second you go from being scared of something to maybe even feeling kind of sorry for it. Maybe. "It is personal," I said. "It's personal to me, my life. You're my mother, the man on the couch is your husband, and yet all we seem to be to you are two more mouths to feed. I just want to understand. It's not even like you hate us. I mean, I think I could deal with that. I could get over it. But you don't hate us, you don't even know we're there. Most of the time I feel like I'm either irritating you or boring you to death and I really want to know why."

My mother held her back so straight all the time, even when there was nothing to lean against. "I said I was sorry about the car. I made a mistake. If I'd known your father was so badly hurt I never would have said what I did."

I slapped my hands down hard on the porch and the sound made both of us jump. "You just won't do this, will you? You won't tell me. I'd really gotten to the point that I thought the problem was that I was afraid to ask, but that isn't it at all. I'm so far beneath you, you don't even think I deserve an answer."

She was quiet for a while. "No," she said. "It's not like that."

"Then what is it like? What? Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me what it is you want." I felt like I was being pulled off the steps, like every force in nature was trying to get me to say, to hell with you, and stalk off into the night. But I fought it. I didn't want to make it that easy on her.

"I guess I always thought that just being here was enough. It's been so hard for me to stay sometimes." She kept her eyes fixed across the field, on her house, the place she wanted to be. "I kept my promises and did what I said I was going to do. Sometimes I fight," she said, and put her fingers on her chest, "just with myself. The part that wants to go and the part that promised to stay. When I moved back to the old house it was because I thought I was going to leave altogether." She waited. Every word seemed to be a burden for her, like she was lifting them up one by one and handing them to me. "Nothing had happened, really, nothing had changed. It was just that I wanted to go again. All these years I thought I'd done a good job because I'd found a way to stay, but I guess if you didn't know those things to begin with, it wouldn't have looked like I was doing anything especially heroic. It probably doesn't look that way even if you do know those things."