Unfortunately, Jacob was no longer talking. When I had first sat down at the table, he’d been mum. Now he was mum to twenty powers of ten. Nothing existed for him except the drawing on which he worked.
I tried more conversational gambits than a lonely logomaniac at a singles’ bar. Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent. After five minutes, I exhausted my tolerance for the sound of my voice.
Although Jacob sat here in the tick of time that bridges past and future, he had cast his mind back to another day before the ocean and the bell and the floating away, whatever that might mean.
Rather than waste time pecking at him until I wore my beak down to a nub, I got to my feet and said, “I’ll come back this afternoon, Jacob.”
If he looked forward to the pleasure of my company, he did a superb job of concealing his delight.
I scanned the framed portraits on the walls and said, “She was your mother, wasn’t she?”
Not even that question drew a reaction from him. Painstakingly, he restored her to life with the power of the pencil.
CHAPTER 22
AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE SECOND floor, Sister Miriam was on duty at the nurses’ station.
If Sister Miriam grips her lower lip with two fingers and pulls it down to reveal the pink inner surface, you will see a tattoo in blue ink, Deo gratias, which is Latin for “Thanks be to God.”
This is not a statement of commitment required of nuns. If it were, the world would probably have even fewer nuns than it does now.
Long before she ever considered the life of the convent, Sister Miriam had been a social worker in Los Angeles, an employee of the federal government. She worked with teenage girls from disadvantaged families, striving to rescue them from gang life and other horrors.
Most of this I know from Sister Angela, the mother superior, because Sister Miriam not only doesn’t toot her own horn—she does not have a horn to toot.
As a challenge to a girl named Jalissa, an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had great promise but who had been on the gang path and about to acquire a gang tattoo, Miriam had said, Girl, what do I have to do to make you think how you’re trading a full life for a withered one? I talk sense to you, but it doesn’t matter. I cry for you, you’re amused. Do I have to bleed for you to get your attention?
She then offered a deal: If Jalissa would promise, for thirty days, to stay away from friends who were in a gang or who hung out with a gang, and if she would not get a gang tattoo the following day as she intended, Miriam would take her at her word and would have her own inner lip tattooed with what she called “a symbol of my gang.”
An audience of twelve at-risk girls, including Jalissa, gathered to watch, wince, and squirm as the tattooist performed his needlework.
Miriam refused topical anesthetics. She had chosen the tender tissue of the inner lip because the cringe factor would impress the girls. She bled. Tears flowed, but she made not one sound of pain.
That level of commitment and the inventive ways she expressed it made Miriam an effective counselor. These years later, Jalissa has two college degrees and is an executive in the hotel industry.
Miriam rescued many other girls from lives of crime, squalor, and depravity. You might expect that one day she would become the subject of a movie with Halle Berry in the title role.
Instead, a parent complained about the spiritual element that was part of Miriam’s counseling strategy. As a government employee, she was sued by an organization of activist attorneys on the grounds of separation of church and state. They wanted her to cut spiritual references from her counseling, and they insisted that Deo gratias be either obscured with another tattoo or expunged. They believed that in the privacy of counseling sessions, she would peel down her lip and corrupt untold numbers of young girls.
You might think this case would be laughed out of court, but you would be as wrong as you were about the Halle Berry movie. The court sided with the activists.
Ordinarily, government employees are not easily canned. Their unions will fight ferociously to save the job of an alcoholic clerk who shows up at work only three days a week and then spends a third of his workday in a toilet stall, tippling from a flask or vomiting.
Miriam was an embarrassment to her union and received only token support. Eventually she accepted a modest severance package.
For a few years thereafter, she held less satisfying jobs before she heard the call to the life she now leads.
Standing behind the counter at the nurses’ station, reviewing inventory sheets, she looked up as I approached and said, “Well, here comes young Mr. Thomas in his usual clouds of mystery.”
Unlike Sister Angela, Abbot Bernard, and Brother Knuckles, she had not been told of my special gift. My universal key and privileges intrigued her, however, and she seemed to intuit something of my true nature.
“I’m afraid you mistake my perpetual state of bafflement for an air of mystery, Sister Miriam.”
If they ever did make a movie about her, the producers would hew closer to the truth if they cast Queen Latifah instead of Halle Berry. Sister Miriam has Latifah’s size and royal presence, and perhaps even more charisma than the actress.
She regards me always with friendly but gimlet-eyed interest, as though she knows that I’m getting away with something even if it’s not something terribly naughty.
“Thomas is an English name,” she said, “but there must be Irish blood in your family, considering how you spread blarney as smooth as warm butter on a muffin.”
“No Irish blood, I’m afraid. Although if you knew my family, you would agree that I come from strange blood.”
“You’re not looking at a surprised nun, are you, dear?”
“No, Sister. You don’t look at all surprised. Could I ask you a few questions about Jacob, in Room Fourteen?”
“The woman he draws is his mother.”
From time to time, Sister Miriam seems just a little psychic herself.
“His mother. That’s what I figured. When did she die?”
“Twelve years ago, of cancer, when he was thirteen. He was very close to her. She seems to have been a devoted, loving person.”
“What about his father?”
Distress puckered her plum-dark face. “I don’t believe he was ever in the picture. The mother never married. Before her death, she arranged for Jacob’s care at another church facility. When we opened, he was transferred here.”
“We were talking for a while, but he’s not easy to follow.”
Now I was looking at a wimple-framed look of surprise. “Jacob talked with you, dear?”
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
“He doesn’t talk with most people. He’s so shy. I’ve been able to bring him out of his shell….” She leaned across the counter toward me, searching my eyes, as if she had seen a fishy secret swim through them and hoped to hook it. “I shouldn’t be surprised that he’ll speak with you. Not at all surprised. You’ve got something that makes everyone open up, don’t you, dear?”
“Maybe it’s because I’m a good listener,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No, that’s not it. Not that you aren’t a good listener. You’re an exceptionally good listener, dear.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
“Have you ever seen a robin on a lawn, head cocked, listening for worms moving all but silently under the grass? If you were beside the robin, dear, you would get the worm first every time.”
“That’s quite an image. I’ll have to give it a try come spring. Anyway, his conversation is kind of enigmatic. He kept talking about a day when he wasn’t allowed to go to the ocean but, quote, ‘they went and the bell rung.’”
“‘Never seen where the bell rung,’” Sister Miriam quoted, “‘and the ocean it moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.’”
“Do you know what he means?” I asked.
“His mother’s ashes were buried at sea. They rang a bell when they sc
attered them, and Jacob was told about it.”
I heard his voice in memory: Jacob’s only scared he’ll float wrong when the dark comes.
“Ah,” I said, feeling just a little Sherlocky, after all. “He worries that he doesn’t know the spot where her ashes were scattered, and he knows the ocean is always moving, so he’s afraid he won’t be able to find her when he dies.”
“The poor boy. I’ve told him a thousand times she’s in Heaven, and they’ll be together again one day, but the mental picture he has of her floating away in the sea is too vivid to dispel.”
I wanted to go back to Room 14 and hug him. You can’t fix things with a hug, but you can’t make them any worse, either.
“What is the Neverwas?” I asked. “He’s afraid of the Neverwas.”
Sister Miriam frowned. “I haven’t heard him use the term. The Neverwas?”
“Jacob says he was full of the black—”
“The black?”
“I don’t know what he means. He said he was full of the black, and the Neverwas came and said, ‘Let him die.’ This was a long time ago, ‘before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.’”
“Before his mother died,” she interpreted.
“Yes. That’s right. But he’s still afraid of the Neverwas.”
She trained upon me that gimlet-eyed stare again, as if she hoped she might pierce my cloud of mystery and pop it as if it were a balloon. “Why are you so interested in Jacob, dear?”
I couldn’t tell her that my lost girl, my Stormy, had made contact with me from the Other Side and had made known, through the instrument of Justine, another sweet lost girl, that Jacob possessed information concerning the source of the violence that would soon befall the school, perhaps before the next dawn.
Well, I could have told her, I guess, but I didn’t want to take a chance that she would pull down my lower lip with the expectation that tattooed on the inside of it would be the word lunatic.
Consequently, I said, “His art. The portraits on his wall. I thought they might be pictures of his mother. The drawings are so full of love. I wondered what it must be like to love your mother so much.”
“What a peculiar thing to say.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Don’t you love your mother, dear?”
“I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.”
I was leaning against the counter, and she took one of my hands in both of hers, squeezed it gently. “I’m a good listener, too, dear. You want to sit down with me for a while and talk?”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t love me or anyone, doesn’t believe in love. She’s afraid of love, of the obligations that come with it. Herself is all she needs, the admirer in the mirror. And that’s the story. There’s really nothing more to sit down and talk about.”
The truth is that my mother is a funhouse full of scares, such a twisted spirit and psychological mare’s nest that Sister Miriam and I could have talked about her without stop until the spring equinox.
But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn’t have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither the time nor the inclination.
“Well, I’m always here,” said Sister Miriam. “Think of me as Oprah with a vow of poverty. Anytime you want to pour out your soul, I’m here, and you don’t have to hold the emotion through commercial breaks.”
I smiled. “You’re a credit to the nun profession.”
“And you,” she said, “are still standing there in clouds of mystery.”
As I turned from the nurses’ station, my attention was drawn to movement at the farther end of the hall. A hooded figure stood in the open stairwell door, where he had apparently been watching me as I talked with Sister Miriam. Aware that he’d been seen, he retreated, letting the door fall shut.
The hood concealed the face, or at least that was the story I tried to sell myself. Although I was inclined to believe that the observer had been Brother Leopold, the suspicious novice with the sunny Iowa face, I was pretty sure the tunic had been black rather than gray.
I hurried to the end of the hall, stepped into the stairwell, and held my breath. Not a sound.
Although the convent on the third floor was forbidden to me and to everyone but the sisters, I ascended to the landing and peered up the last flight of stairs. They were deserted.
No imminent threat loomed, yet my heart raced. My mouth had gone dry. The back of my neck was stippled with cold sweat.
I was still trying to sell myself on the idea that the hood had concealed the face, but I wasn’t buying.
Plunging two steps at a time, wishing I were not in my stocking feet, which slipped on the stone, I went down to the ground floor. I opened the stairwell door, looked out, and did not see anyone.
I descended to the basement, hesitated, opened the door at the foot of the stairs, and halted on the threshold, listening.
A long hallway led the length of the old abbey. A second hall crossed the first at midpoint, but I couldn’t see into it from where I stood. Down here were the Kit Kat Katacombs, the garage, electrical vaults, machinery rooms, and storerooms. I would need a lot of time to investigate all those spaces.
Regardless of how long and thoroughly I searched, I doubted that I would find a lurking monk. And if I did find the phantom, I would probably wish that I had not gone looking for him.
When he had been standing in the open stairwell door, a ceiling light had shown down directly on him. The hoods on the monks’ tunics are not as dramatic as the hood on a medieval cowl. The fabric does not overhang the forehead sufficiently to cast an identity-concealing shadow, especially not in a direct fall of light.
The figure in the stairwell had been faceless. And worse than faceless. The light spilling into the hood had found nothing there to reflect it, only a terrible black emptiness.
CHAPTER 23
MY IMMEDIATE REACTION TO HAVING SEEN Death himself was to get something to eat.
I had skipped breakfast. If Death had taken me before I’d had something tasty for lunch, I would have been really, really angry with myself.
Besides, I couldn’t function properly on an empty stomach. My thinking was probably clouded by plunging blood sugar. Had I eaten breakfast, perhaps Jacob would have made more sense to me.
The convent kitchen is large and institutional. Nevertheless, it’s a cozy space, most likely because it is always saturated with mouthwatering aromas.
When I entered, the air was redolent of cinnamon, brown sugar, baked pork chops simmering with sliced apples, and a host of other delicious smells that made me weak in the knees.
The eight sisters on the culinary detail, all with shining faces and smiles, a few with flour smudges on their cheeks, some with their tunic sleeves rolled back a turn or two, all wearing blue aprons over their white habits, were busy at many tasks. Two were singing, and their lilting voices made the most of a charming melody.
I felt as if I had wandered into an old movie and that Julie Andrews, as a nun, might sweep into the room, singing to a sweet little church mouse perched on the back of her hand.
When I asked Sister Regina Marie if I could make a sandwich, she insisted on preparing it for me. Wielding a knife with a dexterity and pleasure almost unseemly for a nun, she sliced two slabs of bread from a plump loaf, carved a stack of thin slices of beef from a cold roast, lathered one piece of bread with mustard, the other with mayonnaise. She assembled beef, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, chopped olives, and bread into a teetering marvel, pressed it flatter with one hand, quartered it, plated it, added a pickle, and presented it to me in the time it took me to wash my hands at the pot sink.
The kitchen offers stools here and there at counters, where you can have a cup of coffee or eat without being underfoot. I sough
t one of these—and came across Rodion Romanovich.
The bearish Russian was working at a long counter on which stood ten sheet cakes in long pans. He was icing them.
Near him on the granite counter lay the volume about poisons and famous poisoners in history. I noticed a bookmark inserted at about page fifty.
When he saw me, he glowered and indicated a stool near him.
Because I’m an amiable fellow and loath to insult anyone, I find it awkward to decline an invitation, even if it comes from a possibly homicidal Russian with too much curiosity about my reasons for being a guest of the abbey.
“How is your spiritual revitalization proceeding?” Romanovich asked.
“Slow but sure.”
“Since we do not have cactuses here in the Sierra, Mr. Thomas, what will you be shooting?”
“Not all fry cooks meditate to gunfire, sir.” I took a bite of the sandwich. Fabulous. “Some prefer to bludgeon things.”
With his attention devoted to the application of icing to the first of the ten cakes, he said, “I myself find that baking calms the mind and allows for contemplation.”
“So you made the cakes, not just the icing?”
“That is correct. This is my best recipe…orange-and-almond cake with dark-chocolate frosting.”
“Sounds delicious. So to date, how many people have you killed with it?”
“I long ago lost count, Mr. Thomas. But they all died happy.”
Sister Regina Marie brought a glass of Coca-Cola for me, and I thanked her, and she said she had added two drops of vanilla to the Coke because she knew I preferred it that way.
When the sister departed, Romanovich said, “You are universally liked.”
“No, not really, sir. They’re nuns. They have to be nice to everyone.”