Precious Blood

[1]


TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN Cheryl Cass first left home, there were three bus stations in Colchester, New York: Greyhound, Trailways, and RydeAmerican. Now, after a decade of high-tech prosperity, there was only one. Cheryl got off the 7:15 from Baltimore and wandered into it just as the snow was beginning to fall. It was a cold morning in February, soggy and limp. Cheryl was soggy and limp herself. Her fellow passengers were grimy and defeated. Looking for the phone, Cheryl wound her way between them, ignoring as far as possible all the frightened PFCs and glazed-eyed old women with their clothes packed into grocery bags. Her only luggage was a quilted blue nylon shoulder-strap bag, the kind K Mart sold as “carry-on cases” to people who would never be able to afford to take an airplane. Her only valuable was her wedding ring. It was a wide gold band, heavy and expensive, and she still wore it on the fourth finger of her left hand. When she got nervous, she twisted it. When she realized what she was doing, she started to feel guilty. She had been divorced in Nevada when Jimmy Carter was still president. It was silly to go on marking herself as married, and unavailable. It might even be wrong. Sometimes—when she thought very hard about it, when she made herself concentrate—she thought it might have something to do with the fact that she’d been raised Catholic. Her marriage had been blessed in a church. Divorce or no divorce, in the eyes of the Church she was married still.

She got to the phone just as a fat old man in a muddy trenchcoat was pushing a quarter into the slot. There was another phone on the far side of the waiting room, but she had noticed it was broken when she first came in. Its receiver had been ripped out and its coin box jimmied. She sat down at the end of the plastic bench closest to the fat man and folded her hands in her lap. On the wall in front of her, a polished-looking Greyhound sign had been festooned with red plastic Easter eggs and fuzzy-looking electric blue bunnies. Under her shirt, her breasts were aching where their scars came in contact with her bra. The bra confused her almost as much as her wedding ring did. She’d never had much of a chest, and now she didn’t have any. Why did she bother? She shook her head in a quick jerking motion that made one of the plastic combs pop out of her hair. That was the land of question the nuns were always asking when she was in school, the kind of question that had made her so very angry. There was no answer to it and no hope of finding one.

She got out her cigarettes and lit up. Since she already had cancer, she saw no reason to worry about smoking. It wasn’t anything she could do anything about anyway. She was a slave to her circumstances, just like those people she watched on the Oprah Winfrey show. Those circumstances had been rolling over her now for thirty-six years. They were about to squash her flat. She tried to remember some of it—waitressing jobs and two-room apartments, beers and pizzas, Sunday hangovers and roadhouse Saturday nights—but it had all turned to mush. The only things she recalled with absolute clarity were the days she had spent in the hospital and her wedding.

The fat man was slamming down the receiver on the phone. Cheryl got up and crossed quickly to stand behind him. She didn’t want to lose her chance. He went stomping off in the direction of the men’s room and she put her hand in the pocket of her car coat, fishing for a quarter. When she found it, she went looking for another. She was going to have to call information. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but she didn’t know the number she wanted to dial.

She got the number from a snippy-sounding operator, who punched her into a recording before she’d even stopped talking, and repeated it to herself over and over again until she got it dialed. Her memory had never been very good, and between radiation therapy and painkillers it had gotten worse. She only had three dollars besides the two quarters she had plugged into the phone. The bus ticket had been more expensive than she expected it to be, and she had spent a buck fifty in New York on potato chips and Coke. If she’d dialed the number wrong—or if the information she had was full of it, the way so much of the information she got was—she didn’t know what she’d do.

The phone rang and rang, ten times before it was picked up. Then a tired female voice said,

“St. Agnes Rectory. Mrs. Donovan speaking.”

Cheryl took a deep breath. She hadn’t been afraid before, but now she was. She couldn’t imagine what she was doing here. She looked out the window next to the phone and got a view of State Street that dead-ended at the steps of the cathedral. Then she thought about Judy Eagan and Peg Morrissey and Kathleen Burke, walking past her down those steps after the Cathedral School Mass their sophomore year in high school, walking past her as if they didn’t see her.