Alone in the dark room, I tried to remember what she’d said. My mother. Her mouth ran like the wildest of rivers, untamed and splashing, soaking whatever it touched, so that I spent much of my time trying to keep dry. After tonight’s Mass, I’d recognized her voice and followed it until I found her standing with Liam and Maria. My friends. She’d never even met them. Until that night. And now there she was, laughing, calling me over, but not before she’d leaned into them and whispered something, exposing them to the clumsy girl she saw in my approach. And I saw, as I walked closer, that their eyes had changed toward me. They saw me as she did. Awkward. A child. Their faces were moist with laughter, and I wondered what embarrassing thing my mother had told them.
I remembered only their faces, their laughter, my turning and running from the church basement, rounding the corner, pushing past a strawberry-haired parishioner in a prairie dress, ringleted child clinging to the bottom of her quilted skirt. Both seemed suspended—their milky skin and red hair splashing in the air as I passed.
I stepped into the vestry, ran through the musty corridor behind the altar, into the side sacristy, where I scrunched into a ball and fell into the large closet. I pushed one hand over my mouth to smother the rattle of my breath and another over my nose to block the smell of lemon oil, candle wax, and dust. When my breathing slowed and the fear of sneezing had passed, I looked at the open doors and decided them a liability. I leaned forward and tried closing them, but my arms were too short and I managed to pull only one door shut, while the other remained cracked enough to allow a soft shoot of light inside.
The cupboard ran floor to ceiling, and was so old its wood was closer to black than brown. It took up an entire wall of the room and contained vestments used for Mass. The white robes of altar servers fell from hangers and brushed against my face as I folded myself deep into the cupboard.
I didn’t want to be found. Not yet.
I knew the place, but it hardly mattered. As an altar girl, I stood in this room and slipped white cotton robes over my head once or twice a weekend. The youth group met here sometimes, too, all of us crammed together to plan church dances and car washes. But it was different tonight. Cold and dark. Crowded. With more statues than usual.
It was the night before Easter, and the statues removed from the pedestals on Good Friday lined the walls of the room, awaiting their return to the altar. Through the crack of the cupboard door, I eyeballed Joseph, the carpenter. Though I’d never found him especially worthy of devotion, hovering on his pastel-hued globe, face as powdered and pretty as a girl’s, he had never seemed unkind before either. But that night, he seemed put out, and downright nasty.
The light filtering into the room grew duller, speckled and brown. The church was emptying now, only a few people remaining in their pews, bent at the knee, praying hard for Jesus’ return. Most people were down in the basement, clustered and milling, eating sweets and drinking thin coffee, swapping news, wishing each other a happy Easter.
She was down there, too. My mother. Perhaps still talking with Liam and Maria. She had not yet come to find me, had probably not yet realized my flight.
I don’t know how much time passed before I heard her call my name. The sound of her wanting me came in from the window near the parking lot and it was sweet, but I punished her by plugging my ears with my fists and curling deeper into the cupboard. Eventually her voice faded and someone said, “Don’t worry, Therese—she’s probably gone home by now.”
After a series of good-byes and car doors slamming, I listened to the sound of drivers pulling away, one at a time.
The brown light diminished as candles were extinguished out on the altar. I reached into the pocket of my pink corduroys and found the thin white taper and its tiny cardboard drip-tray taken from the vigil Mass. I had no way to light it, but was glad for its company as I moved from the cupboard toward the center of the room.
I sat in a chair. One lined in velvet. A throne, really. The one Pontius Pilate sat on in the annual Passion Play, the one my brother Anthony was brought before in those years when he’d played Jesus. My legs dangled from the chair and I noticed the doll-sized plaster Christ child lying at one of its ornate feet, swaddled by a blanket of pale blue paint. A crack ran alongside his pink-cheeked plaster face and I looked away, to the statue of the black saint, tiny bird held in his dark hands. St. Martin de Porres. I remembered his name from school, then moved my eyes from his peeling skin to the life-sized crucifix resting against the wall. Jesus was on it, suffering. This was the crucifix used on Good Friday, the same bloodied feet lines of old ladies bent to kiss. Dusty boxes filled with blue glass candles lined the wall and waited to be placed as offerings beneath Mary. I caressed the candle in my pocket and longed for the sight of the sweet-faced Virgin. But she was still in the church. Covered with cloth as she mourned for her child. Out in the church with no one for company but the bone-dry gospel writers.
The house on the dead end had been repaired, and we were all together again. I was in the sixth grade. I still enjoyed my favorite things, school and time with Stephanie. I read and she dragged me out for bike rides and street hockey. But ever since my return from Kara’s house, I felt different. I had found a pimple on my face at Kara’s and when I asked her what it was, she had laughed. “Someone’s becoming a teenager,” she’d said.
I wasn’t sure what I was becoming; I only knew that since my return to Lamont Place, I had less patience for the empty refrigerator, and a tougher time laughing off my mother’s moods. Things were changing, and there were times I felt myself completely boxed in. Times I wanted to let loose.
I’d run before. Something my mother said or did would settle inside me until every part of my body demanded flight. So I’d run. And run. Until I got tired, or hungry, or scared. I’d run in circles usually, careful not to stray too far. I wanted escape, but not so perfect an escape I’d be deprived of the worry on her face. I didn’t want to miss the sound of her voice as she called my name.
The last time I ran, I convinced myself I’d be gone forever and so took a box of fund-raising chocolate with me as provisions. “I’ll be gone for weeks,” I thought, “I may need these thin mints for survival.” Hopping the bent wire fence that separated our yard from the back lot, I leaned my body against the cinder-block wall of an old warehouse and considered my options. I thought about heading north, toward Lake Ontario, maybe even on into Canada. Until I remembered suddenly that dead cats were often found in this lot when the snow melted each spring. Soft and sinking, their gray bodies became part of the mud. Too afraid to trudge forward, I considered crying, but instead peeled the gold foil away from a caramel-filled chocolate and popped it into my mouth. Then another. The candy had been intended to help raise money for school. Chocolate sales were as important to the survival of Catholic schools as Bingo. But as I stood waiting for the sound of my mother’s searching, I unwrapped bar after bar of the smooth milk chocolate and set it into my mouth. Only when the sky began to darken and the air started to chill did I hear her voice, and by then, I’d eaten through the entire box of candy.
As soon as I heard her call, I rehopped the fence, nothing remaining in my fund-raising box but balled-up foil. My mother could have rightly punished me for gorging on chocolate we couldn’t afford to replace—or at least shamed me later with a regular retelling of the tale—but she did neither. She only shook her head, quietly handed over a wad of crumpled bills, and never made mention of them again.
A sound outside stopped my thoughts. She was there again, I realized. In the parking lot. She must have asked someone for a ride and come back to the church. It was completely dark in the room when I heard her calling my name. My heart leapt, and I was halfway to shouting when pride cemented me. I listened to her calling—all laughter evaporated from her voice as she wandered the edge of the parking lot, sifting through shrub and weed, saying my name over and over, separated by only a panel of stained glass.
I bit my lip until her voice trailed off and I heard the car pull away. Then, before I even had time to indulge my regret, I heard something, the scraping of metal. From inside the church. I fell to the floor near a log of rolled carpet and squeezed my eyes shut. The sound continued and just then, I remembered that bats were known to roost in that room. I conjured up images of wings stuck in my hair until I deciphered the sound—the jingle of keys. Someone was locking up the church. Locking this room. I hugged the roll of carpet, but, for some reason, did not cry out.
Instead I sobbed. I hated myself and the room with all its broken statues, their stiff and hungry waiting. Only the moon showed mercy, and with its help I found the opening of the rolled carpet, slipped into its mouth, and slept.
I woke to the sound of sweeping. It was dark still, but kinder, with daylight playing at its edges. I climbed out of the carpet and crept to the door where I spied Jane through the glass; the old sacristan was preparing the church for morning Mass. Easter morning, I remembered, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back home with my family. Jane, with her worn face and threadbare sweater, had finished sweeping and was wiping the chalices on the altar, removing the previous night’s smudges. I considered knocking, but decided against it, certain that a woman who genuflected each time she passed the tabernacle (even—as I saw then—when no one was watching), and had dedicated her life to keeping the place sacred, would not have taken kindly to my invasion of it.
I waited.
The minutes were cut with sharp nervous energy, but I waited. Until the clinking of keys finally came near, then disappeared back into the church. When enough time had passed, I tried the door.
It opened.
I looked out into the church.
Mary was draped in blue and glowed in the early light—even the gospel writers lining the altar looked somehow softer now. So I stepped from the room and sprinted behind pews to the set of heavy wooden doors, where I stumbled into the morning.
I ran.
Only this time, I was headed home.
Past the castlelike armory on Main Street, where kids played dodge-ball among the tanks because the school had no gym. Over the railroad bridge, onto Goodman Street, where houses and restaurants and storefronts were locked and sleeping. Through the unusually quiet streets of my neighborhood, slowing only as I neared our dead end. I walked into our yard and headed toward the back entrance, hoping to sneak in unnoticed, praying my mother was sleeping and had somehow forgotten the night before. Her actions were unpredictable lately; I never knew if I’d come home to an erupting volcano, or a cloud of safety. Rounding the last corner, I held my breath.
She was there.
On the steps of the back porch. Staring into the yard. Following her gaze, I noticed the green tips of tulips planted last fall just starting to push at the earth. Near her feet, a mound of rusted frill had begun to uncurl into what would become a bleeding heart; its arching stalks would soon hang heavy with crimson purses.
She turned and caught sight of me.
“There you are,” she said, and turned away.
“Can I still have my Easter basket?” came my greedy response, the only words I could manage.
She nodded and I saw that she was glad I was home.
Like our neighborhood, my mother was unusually quiet. She just sat and looked out over the small yard. And in that silence, I saw her.
I noticed that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to the vigil Mass. I thought of the short-legged polyester pants and her graying hair, and how often they’d embarrassed me—including the night before, as I saw her there, standing with my friends. Looking at her gazing out over our yard, I knew suddenly that it was not only what she said or wore that I feared Liam and Maria might have seen, but who she was—who we were—and for the first time, I imagined a night other than my own.
I sat down next to her and though we did not touch, we were close. Neither of us spoke. Instead, we sat on the rackety old porch and watched as the sun painted itself pink across the sky.