8
The bus rolled to its hissing stop and the door swept open and Angela climbed up into a smell she loved. You couldn’t define it but it was a smell all buses had and it was the smell of childhood. The school bus, yes, but her father had been a driver for the city and he would tip his cap when they came aboard, Good afternoon, ladies, and they would drop their quarters coolly—Good afternoon—and go down the swaying aisle in their summer shifts, their sunglasses, bikini strings playing at their napes, and they would sit where they could watch him, the way he turned the great wheel like a ship captain, swinging their hearts through space when he took the corners, the cordial way he had with every kind of person who stepped on board—and then coming to their stop and tipping his cap again, and these two girls, these identical sun-browned girls kissing him on the cheek, one, two, and skipping down the steps into the sunlight and not turning but feeling the following eyes, the men especially, as the bus rolled on.
Summers of secrecy and love and something else. Of hearts aching for something they could feel just beyond them, around the next wide-swinging turn surely, or the next.
An old woman sat directly behind the driver with a kind of mesh duffel in her lap and after a while a tiny head poked out of the duffel with enormous bat’s ears and round, wet eyes to look about, licking its muzzle with the smallest tongue. At the very back of the bus were three slumping teens, two boys and one girl, skinny black jeans everywhere, oblivious to all but their phones.
Angela watched her town go by. The shopping center. The university. The church where she was married. The soccer field that had been a drive-in theater in its last days when they were sixteen and dating, do you remember that?
Those Meyers twins everybody thought we must go out with?
Identically ridiculous.
Identically boring.
Identically bonered.
Oh my God!
The bus stopped and the old woman with the tiny dog stood and went carefully down the steps. Angela watched her open up a yellow umbrella on the sidewalk, taking care to keep the dog dry. No one else got on. The door swung shut again and the driver signaled and suddenly Angela was on her feet. “Wait! Wait, please,” she called to him, “we need to get off.”
The teenagers, the driver—everyone—watching her make her way, just her, down the aisle.
THE OLD WOMAN TOOK the path that led to the old section of the cemetery, her umbrella climbing a far hill like a cartoon sun amid the dripping trees, the wet ancient stones, and Angela took the path to the newer section, with its smaller trees and its modern stone benches. She’d not been here for so long, but somehow she was calm; the markers and the grass plots and what lay beneath them did not frighten her. Perhaps it was the rain, the absence of sunshine, of birds singing. Perhaps it was the pills.
Her father was here, awaiting her mother, who lived on, half oblivious, in the nursing home. Faith was here too. And next to Faith’s plot was an island of empty grass, the turf undisturbed, unstoned. Back then there’d been plenty of empty plots, but Angela had known. She’d known. Her parents could not imagine the girls separated; they could not imagine Angela a grown woman with a husband, children of her own. You could not imagine burying your children—putting their bodies into the earth while you went on living, growing older—until you had buried one. This was what the second plot had told her.
Do you remember how freaked out you were? Like you were expected to
go too?
It wasn’t that. I thought I should go. It wasn’t fair for you to go alone.
Fair to whom?
She swept the water from the bench as best she could and sat down and
at once felt the dampness in her skirt, the deep chill of the stone. She breathed in the sodden air and blew a faint mist. The rain beat dully at her umbrella. The blood was moving thickly in her veins, dividing, seeking its separate ways.
The bench was cold and hard and the air was cold and there was the smell of leaves and earth and rain, and the umbrella spread over her like a dark canopy, and she sat very still in that sheltering space until the bench became the same stone bench where Caitlin had sat—looking at these gravestones, this pale and cold Virgin with her missing fingers like Grant’s and the brass plaque at her feet, Right Reverend . . . Mercifully Grants, in the Lord, Forty Days of Grace.
Did she pray before the shrine, her daughter? She would ask Sean—did
Caitlin pray? Did you?
What would it mean if they didn’t? What would it mean if they did?
There was a sound, a small rustling, and she saw at her feet a black beetle scrabbling over the yellow aspen leaves. It carried another beetle in its jaws, this second beetle smaller, weightless, inert with death, or perhaps the paralyzing bite.
Pray with me now, Angela.
Somehow she was alone in the woods. Grant, the sheriff, the rangers, the dog handlers, the volunteers—all had fanned out and moved on. Nobody noticed she was not with them. She picked up the walkie-talkie and looked at it: something was wrong with it, the battery was dead.
Pray now? she said. Before this shrine?
Yes.
Is this Lourdes? Cures and miracles? Our Lady of the Missing Fingers.
Please, Angela.
The bland white face like a china doll in the dusk. The clipped, bloodless fingers. Stump-Fingered Lady of Our Missing, keeping watch over the old stones. Crooked old markers of once living Americans, frontiersmen and their kin, drawn west by such scenes and dreams as their minds could conceive. There was that documentary they’d watched about the Donner party: women, children, whole families, freezing and starving in the mountains, eating each other. Some party, said Sean, twelve years old. Caitlin said she would have done what they did: she would’ve eaten to stay alive. Grant—Grant was not there.
The sun was down. The air gone autumn cold, October cold. Her breaths pluming and dispersing like a series of ghosts.
Do you remember when he came back that time, that summer, with his hand in bandages?
Yes, of course.
How he got down on his knees at my feet? How he begged for my forgiveness? The promises he made?
Yes.
No more drinking, no more women. He wasn’t asking for forty days, he was asking for a life. A whole new life. And I gave it to him. I forgave, and I took him back, and I believed God would grace us the more for our fight, for our resilience. And now here we are. And you ask me to pray before this rock?
You did before. After that day on the lake. You didn’t stop praying then.
You didn’t leave me. You never left me!
Neither has she, Angie. Neither has Caitlin. You’ll see. But you have to fight. For her, and for God, but most of all for yourself.
What if I can’t? What if I’m broken, like these fingers?
Oh, honey, said Faith, and said no more, for there were lights in the woods—swinging, wayward lights, like headlights knocked loose. Voices out there, calling.
Angie! Angela!
Her heart leaping wildly—Caitlin! What is it, she cried, what is it?
They were upon her, they came crashing over the fallen leaves in the dark, putting their hands on her. Grant’s face, inscrutable behind the beam of light—Angie, Christ . . . we thought we’d lost you.