True Believers(2)
One of the things Bernadette had done was to make him stop playing the lottery. She had made him take the money he would have spent on lottery tickets and put it in a jar behind the kitchen sink. At the end of a month, she had dumped it all out on the kitchen table and shown him how much there was—and there was nearly three hundred dollars, enough for the utilities two months running, enough for a payment on the truck. Marty thought he would remember it all the rest of his life, the way she had been that night, her red hair caught back in a barrette, her great blue eyes looking bluer than usual in her pale, freckled face. She had been so beautiful, she had made him hurt.
“You have to have a plan,” she had told him again. “You have to think things through.”
He’d never been too good at that: thinking things through. He wasn’t good at it now. He had a sudden vision of the first time she had fallen down in front of him, bucking and shaking, her eyes rolling back in her head—but the vision went black in no time at all. He knew what he had done, the first time she had gotten sick and every time thereafter, but he couldn’t remember himself doing it.
He forced himself to look at Geena’s window, yet again. He forced himself to walk down the alley to Geena’s front door. The inner door was open, in spite of the cold, but at least the storm windows were in the outer door. He’d put them in himself, in November, because Bernadette had reminded him to. The windows were all clean, too, because Bernadette had cleaned them, the way she went down to Geena’s when Geena was sleeping off a drunk to do the dishes or vacuum the floors or get the laundry to the Laundromat so that Geena wouldn’t smell.
“She’s your mother,” Bernadette had said, running her fingers along the edge of a sewing needle she had been trying to thread for the last half hour. “You have to honor your mother, even if she hasn’t been a very good one.”
Sometimes, Marty wondered what it was God thought he was doing. He was supposed to have some very important plan—and there had been times when Marty had claimed to understand it—but the truth was that everything seemed to be a mess. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever went right for more than a minute at a time.
Marty went into Geena’s trailer and turned on the light. He could hear Geena snoring in the back. He could see the small plastic statue of the Virgin Bernadette had put up on the wall next to the front door, as if that alone would be enough to make Geena want to change. Bernadette had statues of the Virgin everywhere, and rosaries, too. She had a Miraculous Medal with a blue glass background that she wore around her neck, always, no matter what. Even in these last few months, when they had not been going to St. Anselm’s at all, Bernadette had not stopped wearing that medal.
Sometimes, when Geena fell asleep drunk, she fell asleep naked. Marty didn’t know how old she was, but he thought she might be going through the menopause. She got hot at night, and even hotter when she was plastered, and then she took off her clothes and left them on the floor. He held his own breath and listened to hers. It was even and untroubled. It didn’t sound as if she were sucking in her own vomit. If she were lying naked, he should cover her—but he didn’t want to see her that way. It made him sick to his stomach, and angry in a way he couldn’t explain.
He listened for a moment more, and then went back outside, closing the inner door behind him, because that would at least let Geena’s trailer warm up. The moon over his head was full and clear. The air around him was very sharp. His hands were cold enough to feel stiff. He walked back to the truck and got in behind the wheel, moving carefully so that he did not startle Bernadette. He found himself wishing that her eyes were open, so that he could look into them, so deeply that he could see the bottom of her soul.
Instead, he got the truck started and the heater turned on, then headed out down the dirt track toward the town road. It was going to be a long drive into Philadelphia, and there would be traffic even at four o’clock in the morning. If they got there too late, Mass would be starting, and they wouldn’t be able to do what they needed to do. He should have listened to Bernadette in everything, without exception, even in those times when he had been so frightened he hadn’t been able to listen at all.
He had just turned onto the two-lane blacktop when Bernadette shifted in her seat and seemed to shudder. He leaned over and put his right hand over hers, to comfort her in sleep.
It was only when he felt the marble coldness of her skin that he remembered, for the first time in an hour, that Bernadette was dead.
2
On any other day of his life, the Reverend Daniel Burdock would have been asleep at four o’clock in the morning. He would at least have been to sleep sometime before then. Even in college, when everybody else he knew was spending two days a week trying to figure out if they could stay up forty-eight hours straight, he had been able to leave the party and sack out at a halfway-reasonable hour. Now he had been awake and restless for almost a full day, and it didn’t look like it was going to come to an end anytime soon. He had a terrible premonition that he was going to show up at the funeral this afternoon and keel right over—of exhaustion, or a heart attack, or simple frustration. Something was going to happen. He couldn’t go on like this. He couldn’t go on thinking like this. This was the way people like Timothy McVeigh thought, before they went out and did something stupid.