Beyond her, the blizzard didn’t seem as though it wanted to be embraced, not this storm of storms. It looked instead as though it wanted to blow down the school and the abbey and the forest beyond, blow down everything on the face of the earth that dared to stand upright, and bury everything, and be done with civilization and with humanity once and for all.
By the time I reached her, before I could shout a warning above the wind, Sister Clare Marie retreated from the threshold.
Neither a demon nor an Amway salesperson loomed out of the frigid tempest before I pushed the door shut and engaged the dead-bolt lock once more.
As she placed the boots on the rubber mat, I said, “Wait, I’ll get a mop, don’t open the door, I’ll get a mop and clean this up.”
I sounded shaky, as if I had once been badly traumatized by a mop and needed to summon the courage to use one.
The nun didn’t seem to notice the quaver in my voice. With a sunny smile, she said, “You’ll do no such thing. You’re a guest here. Letting you do my work, I’d be embarrassed in front of the Lord.”
Indicating the puddle of melting slush on the floor, I said, “But I’m the one who made the mess.”
“That’s not a mess, child.”
“It looks like a mess to me.”
“That’s weather! And it’s my work. Besides, Mother Superior wants to see you. She called up to the abbey, and they said you’d been seen going outside, maybe you were coming this way, and here you are. She’s in her office.”
I watched her fetch a mop from a closet near the front door.
When she turned and saw that I hadn’t left, she said, “Go on now, shoo, see what Mother Superior wants.”
“You won’t open the door to wring out the mop on the stoop, will you, Sister?”
“Oh, there’s not enough to wring. It’s just a small puddle of weather come inside.”
“You won’t open the door just to glory in the blizzard, will you?” I asked.
“It is a fantastic day, isn’t it?”
“Fantastic,” I said with no enthusiasm.
“If I’ve got my chores done before None and rosary, then I might take time for the weather.”
None was the midafternoon prayer, at twenty minutes past four, more than six and a half hours from now.
“Good. Just before None—that’ll be a nice time for watching a storm. Much nicer than now.”
She said, “I might make a cup of hot chocolate and sit by a window and glory in the blizzard from a cozy corner of the kitchen.”
“Not too close to the window,” I said.
Her pink brow furrowed. “Whyever not, child?”
“Drafts. You don’t want to sit in a draft.”
“Nothing wrong with a good draft!” she assured me heartily. “Some are cold, some are warm, but it’s all just air on the move, circulating so it’s healthy to breathe.”
I left her swabbing up the small puddle of weather.
If something hideous came through the window with the one cracked pane, Sister Clare Marie, wielding the mop like a cudgel, would probably have the moves and the attitude to get the best of the beast.
CHAPTER 17
ON THE WAY TO THE MOTHER SUPERIOR’S office, I passed the large recreation room, where a dozen nuns were supervising the children at play.
Some of the kids have severe physical disabilities combined with mild mental retardation. They like board games, card games, dolls, toy soldiers. They decorate cupcakes themselves and help make fudge, and they enjoy arts and crafts. They like to have stories read to them, and they want to learn to read, and most of them do learn.
The others have either mild or severe physical disabilities but greater mental retardation than the first group. Some of these, like Justine in Room 32, seem not to be much with us, though most of them have an inner life that expresses itself overtly when least expected.
The betweeners—not as detached as Justine, not as involved as those who want to read—like to work with clay, string beads to make their own jewelry, play with stuffed animals, and perform small tasks that help the sisters. They enjoy hearing stories, too; the stories may be simpler, but the magic of stories remains potent for them.
What all of them like, regardless of their limits, is affection. At a touch, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, at any indication that you value them, respect them, believe in them, they shine.
Later in the day, in either of the two rehabilitation rooms, they will take physical therapy to gain strength, improve agility. Those struggling to communicate will get speech therapy. For some, rehab is actually task instruction, during which they learn to dress themselves, to tell time, to make change and manage small allowances.
Special cases will move on from St. Bart’s, be paired with assistance dogs or caregivers, graduate to a supported independence when they are eighteen or older. Because many of these kids are so severely disabled, however, the world will never welcome them, and this place is their home for life.
Fewer of the residents are adults than you might think. These children have been dealt terrible blows, most of them while not yet delivered from their mothers’ wombs, others by violence before they were three. They are fragile. For them, twenty years is longevity.
You might think that watching them struggle through various kinds of rehab would be heartbreaking, considering that they are often destined to die young. But there is no heartbreak here. Their small triumphs thrill them as much as winning a marathon might thrill you. They know moments of unadulterated joy, they know wonder, and they have hope. Their spirits won’t be chained. In my months among them, I have never heard one child complain.
As medical science has advanced, such institutions as St. Bart’s have fewer kids damaged by severe cerebral palsy, by toxoplasmosis, by well-understood chromosomal abnormalities. Their beds are taken these days by the offspring of women who preferred not to give up cocaine or ecstasy, or hallucinogens, for nine boring months, who played dice with the devil. Other children here were badly beaten—skulls cracked, brains damaged—by their drunken fathers, by their mothers’ meth-rotted boyfriends.
With so many new cells and lightless pits required, Hell must be going through a construction boom these days.
Some will accuse me of being judgmental. Thank you. And proud of it. You wreck a kid’s life, I have no pity for you.
There are doctors who advocate killing these children at birth, with lethal injections, or who would let them die later by declining to treat their infections, allowing simple illnesses to become catastrophic.
More cells. More lightless pits.
Maybe my lack of compassion for these abusers of children—and other failures of mine—means I won’t see Stormy on the Other Side, that the fire I face will be consuming rather than purifying. But at least if I wind up in that palpable dark where having no cable TV is the least of the inconveniences, I will have the pleasure of seeking you out if you have beaten a child. I will know just what to do with you, and I will have eternity to do it.
In the recreation room on that snowy morning, perhaps with Hell coming to meet us in the hours ahead, the children laughed and talked and gave themselves to make-believe.
At the piano in the corner sat a ten-year-old boy named Walter. He was a crack baby and a meth baby and a Wild Turkey baby and a God-knows-what baby. He could not speak and rarely made eye contact. He couldn’t learn to dress himself. After hearing a melody just once, he could play it note-perfect, with passion and nuance. Although he had lost so much else, this gift of talent had survived.
He played softly, beautifully, lost in the music. I think it was Mozart. I’m too ignorant to know for sure.
While Walter made music, while the children played and laughed, bodachs crawled the room. The three last night had become seven.
CHAPTER 18
SISTER ANGELA, THE MOTHER SUPERIOR, MANAGED the convent and the school from a small office adjacent to the infirmary. The desk, the two visitors’ chairs, and the file cabinet
s were simple but inviting.
On the wall behind her desk hung a crucifix, and on the other walls were three posters: George Washington; Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird; and Flannery O’Connor, the author of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and many other stories.
She admires these people for many reasons, but especially for one quality they all shared. She will not identify that quality. She wishes you to ponder the riddle and arrive at your own answer.
Standing in her office doorway, I said, “I’m sorry about my feet, ma’am.”
She looked up from a file she was reviewing. “If they have a fragrance, it’s not so intense that I smelled you coming.”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry for my stocking feet. Sister Clare Marie took my boots.”
“I’m sure she’ll give them back, Oddie. We’ve had no problem with Sister Clare Marie stealing footwear. Come in, sit down.”
I settled into one of the chairs in front of her desk, indicated the posters, and said, “They’re all Southerners.”
“Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic, but that’s not why these particular faces are inspiring to me.”
I said, “Fame.”
“Now you’re being intentionally dense,” she said.
“No, ma’am, not intentionally.”
“If what I admired in these three was their fame, then I’d just as well have put up posters of Al Capone, Bart Simpson, and Tupac Shakur.”
“That sure would be something,” I said.
Leaning forward, lowering her voice, she said, “What’s happened to dear Brother Timothy?”
“Nothing good. That’s all I know for sure. Nothing good.”
“One thing we can be certain of—he didn’t dash off to Reno for some R and R. His disappearance must be related to the thing we spoke of last evening. The event the bodachs have come to witness.”
“Yes, ma’am, whatever it is. I just saw seven of them in the recreation room.”
“Seven.” Her soft grandmotherly features stiffened with steely resolution. “Is the crisis at hand?”
“Not with seven. When I see thirty, forty, then I’ll know we’re coming to the edge. There’s still time, but the clock is ticking.”
“I spoke with Abbot Bernard about the discussion you and I had last night. And now with the disappearance of Brother Timothy, we’re wondering if the children should be moved.”
“Moved? Moved where?”
“We could take them into town.”
“Ten miles in this weather?”
“In the garage we have two beefy four-wheel-drive extended SUVs with wheelchair lifts. They’re on oversize tires to give more ground clearance, plus chains on the tires. Each is fitted with a plow. We can make our own path.”
Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.
“We can take eight to ten in each van,” she continued. “Moving half the sisters and all the children might require four trips, but if we start now we’ll be done in a few hours, before nightfall.”
Sister Angela is a doer. She likes to be on the move physically and intellectually, always conceiving and implementing projects, accomplishing things.
Her can-do spirit is endearing. At that moment, she looked like whichever no-nonsense grandmother had passed down to George S. Patton the genes that had made him a great general.
I regretted having to let the air out of her plan after she’d evidently spent some time inflating it.
“Sister, we don’t know for sure that the violence, when it happens, will happen here at the school.”
She looked puzzled. “But it’s already started. Brother Timothy, God rest his soul.”
“We think it’s started with Brother Tim, but we don’t have a corpse.”
She winced at the word corpse.
“We don’t have a body,” I amended, “so we don’t know for sure what’s happened. All we know is that the bodachs are drawn to the kids.”
“And the children are here.”
“But what if you move the kids in town to a hospital, a school, a church, and when we get them settled in, the bodachs show up there because that’s where the violence is going to go down, not here at St. Bart’s.”
She was as good an analyst of strategy and tactics as Patton’s grandma might have been. “So we would have been serving the forces of darkness when we thought we’d been thwarting them.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s possible.”
She studied me so intently that I convinced myself I could feel her periwinkle-blue stare riffling through the contents of my brain as if I had a simple file drawer between my ears.
“I’m so sorry for you, Oddie,” she murmured.
I shrugged.
She said, “You know just enough so that, morally, you’ve got to act…but not enough to be certain exactly what to do.”
“In the crunch, it clarifies,” I said.
“But only at the penultimate moment, only then?”
“Yes, ma’am. Only then.”
“So when the moment comes, the crunch—it’s always a plunge into chaos.”
“Well, ma’am, whatever it is, it’s never not memorable.”
Her right hand touched her pectoral cross, and her gaze traveled across the posters on her walls.
After a moment, I said, “I’m here to be with the kids, to walk the halls, the rooms, see if I can get a better feel for what might be coming. If that’s all right.”
“Yes. Of course.”
I rose from the chair. “Sister Angela, there’s something I want you to do, but I’d rather you didn’t ask me why.”
“What is it?”
“Be sure all the doors are dead-bolted, all the windows locked. And instruct the sisters not to go outside.”
I preferred not to tell her about the creature that I had seen in the storm. For one thing, on that day I stood in her office I did not yet have words to describe the apparition. Also, when nerves are too frayed, clear thinking unravels, so I needed her to be alert to danger without being in a continuous state of alarm.
Most important, I didn’t want her to worry that she had allied herself with someone who might be not merely a fry cook, and not merely a fry cook with a sixth sense, but a totally insane fry cook with a sixth sense.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll be sure we’re locked, and there’s no reason to go out in that storm, anyway.”
“Would you call Abbot Bernard and ask him to do the same thing? For the remaining hours of the Divine Office, the brothers shouldn’t go outside to enter the church through the grand cloister. Tell them to use the interior door between the abbey and the church.”
In these solemn circumstances, Sister Angela had been robbed of her most effective instrument of interrogation: that lovely smile sustained in patient and intimidating silence.
The storm drew her attention. As ominous as ashes, clouds of snow smoked across the window.
She looked up at me again. “Who’s out there, Oddie?”
“I don’t know yet,” I replied, which was true to the extent that I could not name what I had seen. “But they mean to do us harm.”
CHAPTER 19
WEARING AN IMAGINARY DOG COLLAR, I LET intuition have my leash, and was led in a circuitous route through the ground-floor rooms and hallways of the school, to a set of stairs, to the second floor, where the Christmas decorations did not inspire in me a merry mood.
When I stopped at the open door to Room 32, I suspected that I had deceived myself. I had not given myself to intuition, after all, but had been guided by an unconscious desire to repeat the experience of the previous night, when it seemed that Stormy had spoken to me through sleeping Annamarie by way of mute Justine.
At the time, as much as I had desired the contact, I had spurned it. I had been right to do so.
Stormy is my past, and she will be my future only after my life
in this world is over, when time finishes and eternity begins. What is required of me now is patience and perseverance. The only way back is the way forward.
I told myself to turn away, to wander farther onto the second floor. Instead I crossed the threshold and stood just inside the room.
Drowned by her father at four, left for dead but still alive eight years later, the radiantly beautiful girl sat in bed, leaning against plump pillows, eyes closed.
Her hands lay in her lap, both palms upturned, as though she waited to receive some gift.
The voices of the wind were muffled but legion: chanting, snarling, hissing at the single window.
The collection of plush-toy kittens watched me from the shelves near her bed.
Annamarie and her wheelchair were gone. I had seen her in the recreation room, where behind the laughter of children, quiet Walter, who could not dress himself without assistance, played classical piano.
The air seemed heavy, like the atmosphere between the first flash of lightning and the first peal of thunder, when the rain has formed miles above but has not yet reached the earth, when fat drops are descending by the millions, compressing the air below them as one last warning of their drenching approach.
I stood in light-headed anticipation.
Beyond the window, frenzies of driven snow chased down the day, and though obviously the wind still flogged the morning, its voices faded, and slowly a cone of silence settled upon the room.
Justine opened her eyes. Although usually she looks through everything in this world, now she met my gaze.
I became aware of a familiar fragrance. Peaches.
When I worked as a short-order cook in Pico Mundo, before the world grew as dark as it is now, I washed my hair in a peach-scented shampoo that Stormy had given me. It effectively replaced the aromas of bacon and hamburgers and fried onions that lingered in my locks after a long shift at the griddle and grill.
At first dubious about peach shampoo, I had suggested that a bacon-hamburgers-fried-onions scent ought to be appealing, ought to make the mouth water, and that most people had quasi-erotic reactions to the aromas of fried food.