Then again, I’m not completely accustomed to Grandmother. So never mind.
Sandy wheels her harp to the center of the room, and the more alert residents shift and stir.
“Wake up, Doreen,” one lady says, shaking the arm of her friend. “It’s Sandy, here with her harp.”
“Oh, Sandy,” says another lady. “Will you play the Pachelbel, dear? So lovely. A gift from sweet Jesus.”
One of the few old men, skinny and frail with pants that come up to his rib cage, puts his fingers to his mouth and whistles. “One hunner percent woman,” he calls out.
Sandy grins. “You got that right, Oscar.”
“Sandy!” I say in a scandalized voice. But of course I’m delighted.
“Oscar, hush,” says the Jesus lady, who isn’t. “Go bother the nurses if you’re after a ruckus.”
Sandy sets up her harp, then strides to the side of the room and grabs an empty chair. She’s more confident here than she is at school. She plunks the chair behind the harp, sits down, and spends a few minutes fooling with the strings. Then she starts to play.
I find a place against the wall. Sandy pushes her tongue around in her mouth while she plucks, but the sounds that rise from her harp . . . they’re lovely. Again I’m struck by how unpredictable our world is, a world in which lumpish girls make beautiful music while beautiful girls turn others into lumps.
I slide my spine down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor. I close my eyes and listen, and it’s such a release to be transported from my humming, overworked brain. I’m a transparent dot floating in the universe. I’m not thinking about fancy panties; I’m not thinking of cherry Cokes. Or fine, maybe I am, but not with the same urgency as before. Good-bye, panties! Fly away! Fly away, thirst-quenching cherry Cokes!
I’m glad for Sandy, that she has this inside her.
Sandy plays four songs. The notes of her last selection flow out in a rich, final-sounding succession, and her hands hover above the strings until the tones die away. There’s a moment of stillness, and then Sandy smacks her hands to her knees.
“That’s it,” she says. “Time’s up.”
The residents who are still awake beam and clap their hands. The others jerk upright, blinking and stirring. An old lady plucks at the blanket in her lap and says, “It’s too cold in here. Somebody turn up the heat.”
I stand and go over to Sandy, who’s wrestling her harp back onto its cart.
“Heavenly, heavenly,” the Jesus lady says, hovering by Sandy’s side. “Our own dear angel.”
Another resident tugs Sandy’s sleeve. “My granddaughter plays the flute,” she says.
“No, Doreen,” scolds the Jesus lady. “That’s Larissa who plays the flute, my oldest boy’s girl. You don’t have any grandchildren.”
“So selfish,” Doreen tells the Jesus lady. “Selfish, selfish, selfish.”
“I’m selfish for telling the truth?” the Jesus lady says.
“And you cheat at bingo, always stealing the banana.”
“I don’t steal the—” Jesus lady breaks off. She huffs. “If there happens to be a banana on the prize cart, I take it. Is that a crime?”
“Selfish banana-stealer,” Doreen says.
So this is what it’s like to be old, I marvel. Why, it’s no different from high school. But I get plenty of high school on my own, so I tear myself away from their conversation and focus on Sandy.
“That was great,” I say. I pause, wanting to give more. “You were great.”
Sandy shoulders the harp toward the hall. I trot along behind her. She pulls up short to avoid a nurse carrying a high stack of towels, then starts walking again.
“You liked it?” she says. “Really?”
“You were amazing,” I say.
“Hah,” she says. “Shows how much you know.”
Leave it to Sandy to flip a compliment upside-down.
“So . . . what now? Are we done?”
“Not yet. Some of the residents can’t get out of bed anymore, so we’re going to do a couple of room visits.”
She raps on a half-open door. “Wake up, Elsie. It’s Sandy.” She pushes through without waiting for an answer.
“Come on,” she says, looking back at me.
Inside the room, the lady in the bed smoothes her quilt with nervous pats. Her white hair sticks up in a puff around her head, and pale pink earrings hang from her ears like oversize buttons. “Sandy,” she says. “I’m a bit tired today.”
“Want me to leave?”
“No, no. Stay.” She gestures at me. “Who’s this?”
“No one,” Sandy says, and I make a sound of indignation. I’m a little stung, to tell the truth. That’s who I am to her? No one?
“Just someone from school,” she says, shooting me a look that says, Don’t get your knickers in a wad. Geez. “I’m going to play now, okay?
Like in the recreation room, the music takes over when Sandy starts plucking. She plays Pachelbel’s Canon for a second time, but she plays some new songs too. Hymns, I think.
Elsie flutters her fingers along with the music. Her eyelids droop as Sandy comes to the end of her set, but snap open the instant Sandy stands to go.
“One more,” she says.
“Sorry,” says Sandy. “I’ve got other residents to play for.”
“Hmmph,” Elsie says. “I know who you mean, and I don’t know why you bother.”
Sandy tightens her jaw.
Straining forward, Elsie fumbles with the drawer of her bedside table. “Here, have some candy before you go.”
She holds out a cardboard box of Snirkles candy bars, and Sandy takes one despite her apparent irritation. I take one too.
“Thanks,” I say.
But in the hall, after I’ve ripped mine open and taken a bite, I spit it into a trash can.
“Igh,” I say. “The caramel is crusty.”
“Because it’s about a thousand years old,” Sandy says. She chucks her candy bar into the trash as well, then reaches into her pocket. “But check this out.”
In her hand is a twenty-dollar bill. I look at it, then at Sandy.
“Don’t worry,” Sandy says. “She didn’t notice.”
“Who?” I ask. Then comes the bad feeling. “Elsie?”
Sandy smiles triumphantly.
“Please tell me you didn’t steal from that sweet old lady,” I say. “Twenty dollars, that’s like . . .” I swallow. “That’s a lot of money, Sandy!”
“Elsie doesn’t care.” She stuffs the bill back in her pocket. “And she’s not sweet.”
“Sandy, go give it back.”
Sandy takes both of my hands, which utterly shocks me. Her palms are moist.
“Bliss, don’t you ever want to be more?”
I try to pull away. “What do you mean? More what?”
“More. Just . . . more. More than what society says you should be, more than a stupid rule-follower. You know who the rules are made to protect, right? Not me. Not you. They’re made for the people who already have everything, that’s who.”
“Like Elsie?”
Anger darkens her face. “You don’t know her like I do.”
“She’s an old lady, Sandy. An old lady you just stole from.” I free my hands.
Sandy starts down the hall with the harp. The set of her shoulders tells me she isn’t pleased with me. Well, I’m not pleased with her, either, and I press my lips together as I take a loping step to catch up with her.
“Bliss, listen,” she says.
“Give Elsie her money.”
“You know that expression, ‘The scales fell from his eyes’?” she asks.
Of course I do. It’s from the Bible, which means I heard it from Flying V on more than one occasion. I’m not interested in discussing it now, though.
“For real, Sandy,” I say. I follow her, but only to make her do the right thing. “Turn around.”
“It’s what you say when someone’s blind to reality, and then something ha
ppens and they’re not,” Sandy says. “The scales fall from their eyes and they realize how . . . illusory everything is.”
“So that twenty-dollar bill was an illusion? Wow, good trick.”
She draws up short, and I nearly run into her. “You’re deliberately not understanding,” she says. “All the rules we’re taught, the only reason they exist is so the people in power can keep the rest of us down. But the rule-makers don’t follow the rules themselves, because why should they? Rules are just words. That’s all. And once you realize that . . .”
Her expression is no longer angry, but beseeching. “Bliss, it liberates you.”
“I don’t need to be liberated.”
“But you do.” She says it with the fervor of a visionary, and for a disjointed second I doubt the certainty of my position. Is it possible she sees something I don’t?
Then I reclaim my sanity and think, She is so full of it.
“Kitten?” a weak voice asks. I turn toward the sound, which is coming from inside room 13. On the door is a construction paper heart that says “Agnes Nutter.”
“One sec,” Sandy calls. To me, she says, “That’s Agnes.” Her tone is admiring, a quality I don’t often hear in Sandy. “You’re going to love her.”
“Actually, I’m going to go,” I say.
“What? No! You’ve got to meet Agnes. You have to!”
“I can meet Agnes another time,” I say, knowing full well there won’t be another time.
“Wait. I’ll return the money, okay?” She abandons her harp and drags me back the way we came. She plants me in front of Elsie’s room and pulls the twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. She waves it in the air. Then she goes into Elsie’s room, pushing the door wide so I have full view of her actions.
“Me again,” she says, slapping the bill on Elsie’s dresser. Elsie startles awake and strains to sit up, but Sandy pushes her back against the pillow. “Just wanted to say ‘Have a great day.’ Bye!”
“Sandy?” Elsie calls in confusion, but Sandy’s back in the hall with me.
“Are you satisfied?” she says.
I stare at her. I struggle for words, coming up at last with, “You are such a dingbat.”
“Takes one to know one,” Sandy retorts. Her relief is palpable. A smile trembles across her face, and she seizes my wrist and tows me back to Agnes’s room. “Now, come on, you promised you’d meet Agnes.”
“No, I didn’t,” I say, feeling like a rag doll, or maybe a puppet.
“She was a novice at Crestview, back when it was a convent, and she’s got the absolute best stories. She knows practically everything.”
“Kitten?” Agnes calls.
Sandy propels me into Agnes’s room. I trip over my own feet, and I nearly laugh. This whole situation is just that ridiculous.
Then I see Agnes. And her birthmark. I see Agnes’s birthmark, which is the color of fruit punch. It’s as if someone splashed a cup of punch right in her face, and the punch congealed in a slippery mass that couldn’t be wiped off. My laughter dries up.
“This is Bliss,” Sandy announces. She ducks back for her harp, which she wheels in and parks in the corner of the room. “Bliss is my best friend.”
“Best friend?” I say to Sandy, mainly because I don’t want to look at Agnes. “Five minutes ago, I was no one.”
Sandy frowns as if she has no idea what I’m talking about. Then she shifts all her attention to the woman in the bed, her manner reverent. “And Bliss, this is Agnes.”
Awkwardly, I meet Agnes’s gaze. The birthmark is still there, a violent, purplish lesion that disfigures half her face. It runs from the left side of her forehead to the left side of her chin, splitting her in two. I don’t want to stare, but I also don’t want to not stare.
“Some of us hide our differences on the inside,” Agnes says to me kindly. “Others wear them on the outside, for all the world to see. Don’t be scared, pet.”
I feel myself flush, my skin growing so warm that I, too, probably look diseased.
“Just take a good, long look,” Agnes says. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”
I’m shamed by her grace, and I lift my eyes. The affected skin is mottled with swollen capillaries. In some places the surface is tight and shiny; in other spots, its texture is thicker. The left side of her upper lip swells out in a bulbous lump, as if a caterpillar is nesting inside. That’s the shape of it, anyway. I fight a wave of nausea and keep looking. I will look and look until my queasiness passes. I will.
Agnes laughs, a faint chuckle like rustling leaves. “You see? I’m just like you.”
I meet her eyes, which are a dark, twinkly brown, and I do see. I give her a sheepish smile.
“Oh my, how happy you’ve made an old woman,” she says to the two of us. “What a lonely day it’s been. But now you two are here. I’m glad.”
“Bliss goes to Crestview with me,” Sandy says. “She wants to hear what it was like in the olden days.”
“Do you, now?” Agnes says. She takes my hand, and I let her. Her skin is papery. She gives me little pats.
“Only if you feel like it,” I say. “We don’t want to bother you.”
“Sweet girl, there’s nothing I’d like more. Otherwise they’ll come for me and make me play bingo, and that foolish Elsie will get all worked up, as she always does.” She clucks. “She thinks I bear the mark of the devil.”
“You see?” Sandy says to me. To Agnes, she says, “Elsie is an idiot. You were a nun, for God’s sake.”
“‘For God’s sake,’” Agnes repeats, amused. “Yes, that was my intent. It didn’t always feel that way, however.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
Agnes pulls at me, coaxing me to sit. I perch beside her on the thin mattress.
“I’ll tell you,” she says, “but you need to know, it’s not a pretty story. It’s not . . . a comfortable story. Are you brave of heart?”
“Um . . . I think,” I say, though I’m suddenly not. I’m suddenly certain that her story has to do with the dead girl. I want to hear it, though. “At least, I try to be.”
She scrutinizes me. I try not to fidget, and at last she nods.
“Sandy, dear,” she says, “would you be so kind as to close the door?”
gnes is a good storyteller—that, and she has an excellent story to tell. When she was twelve, her parents sent her to be a novice at the Holy Order of Perpetual Chastity, which is what Crestview was called back then. She took her vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, and she lived inside the convent walls with the other members of the order. Mother Mary Josephine was her Mother Superior.
“Was she nice?” I ask, recalling my image of Hamilton Hall as a grim and disapproving mother.
“I wouldn’t say ‘nice,’” Agnes says. “She did what she needed to do. She kept us girls under control. And for the most part, we lived in harmony.” She tsk-ed. “That all changed when Liliana came.”
“Liliana?” I ask.
Sandy joins us on the bed, sitting on my left. “Liliana is who I want to be when I grow up,” she says.
“Sandy,” Agnes says in a warning tone.
“Well, she is!” Sandy insists. To me, she says, “Agnes has told me all about Liliana, and she’s pretty much my hero. She was a novice just like Agnes—except she wasn’t anything like Agnes, because Agnes was a rule-follower and Liliana was the original bad girl.” She giggles. “Isn’t that funny, to think of a nun being bad?”
“It’s not funny,” Agnes says. “And if you recall, Liliana never got to be a nun.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sandy says. She rolls her eyes as if to make fun of herself. “Oops. Anyway, tell her, Agnes.”
Agnes fixes her deep eyes on me. “Liliana came to us when she was fourteen. She’d had a troubled past, I’m afraid.”
“She was an orphan,” Sandy says. “Her parents immigrated to America when she was a baby, but then they died. Tell her, Agnes.”
Agnes gives Sandy a look.
“Sorry,” Sandy says. She makes the motion of zipping her lips.
Agnes waits. Sandy stays quiet. Agnes turns to me and says, “Yes. Liliana’s father died in a factory accident, and six months later, her mother died from a disease she contracted in their unsanitary living quarters.”
“So Liliana was put on an orphan train,” Sandy says. “That’s what they did back then.”
“What’s an orphan train?” I ask.
“Orphan trains took children like Liliana to new homes,” Agnes explains. “Homes with God-fearing parents, ample food, and plenty of fresh air.”
“Plenty of work too,” Sandy butts in. “The orphans were slave labor, that’s what they were. Only Liliana was too smart to go along with it, so she got herself kicked out. See why she’s my hero?”
“Hmm,” Agnes says. “I believe that’s your own interpretation, Sandy dear. As I understood it, the couple who took in Liliana was unable to care for her, good as their intentions were.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sandy says. “Likely story.”
“On the farm where she was sent, carcasses of animals began showing up, drained entirely of blood,” Agnes says.
“Ick,” I say.
“Blood magic,” Sandy says, almost under her breath, but not quite.
“Blood magic?” I say.
Agnes shoots Sandy another look of warning, then turns back to me.
“And though her foster parents were loath to assign blame,” she says, “they decided that sending Liliana to the Holy Order of Perpetual Chastity might better meet everyone’s needs.”
“Because they were expecting their own child,” Sandy says. “The lady got pregnant and said to Liliana, ‘Okay, done with you, bye-bye.’”
“But if it was true,” I say. “If Liliana was experimenting with . . . blood magic—”
“Oh, she was,” Sandy assures me. “But not in, like, an evil way.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted her around my baby either,” I finish. “And how could killing animals and draining their blood not be evil?” I turn to Agnes. “Was Liliana evil, Agnes? And what is blood magic? And was Liliana . . . is Liliana . . . is she the girl who killed herself?”
“You know about that?” Sandy says. I can almost see her mind working. “Oh. The Crestview ghost story.” She presses her lips together derisively. “Yes, that’s Liliana, but the story that’s passed around is just stupid. I never told you because I wanted you to hear it from Agnes. I wanted you to hear the truth.”