Ten Thousand Saints

Twenty-Three





The van was parked in the alley in the morning. When Harriet saw it through the window above the kitchen sink, she dashed in her robe and moccasins up the stairs, past the bathroom, where Prudence was singing in the shower, past Prudence’s open door, where the great mass of a bald Eliza was passed out across the trundle bed like Rousseau’s sleeping gypsy, up to the third floor. Jude didn’t stir when she pushed the door open, or when she sat on the edge of the bottom bunk. It was when she touched the cut on his lip that he bolted awake. He sat up and looked at her, at the bedroom around him, at the lemony light drifting through the curtains, then lay back down.

“F*ck,” he said. “I was dreaming I was driving.”

Had his voice deepened, or was it just hoarse with sleep? “You guys must have gotten in late. You want to tell me where that cut on your lip came from?”

“Born with it.”

“What about that black eye?”

“Doesn’t matter anymore. Bridge over troubled water.”

Harriet fought the urge to touch the bruise under his eye. “Water under the bridge, you mean?”

“Whatever. I don’t know your hippie songs.” He yawned. “Hey, Dad said my name isn’t from that hippie song. He said it’s from the saint.”

“He did, did he.”

“It’s not?”

She reached for his hands, weighing them in hers. “I guess it’s both. But really we gave you the name because of what it means.” His burn was twisted with scar tissue, healed to a muscley pink, and on the other hand, the X had healed, too. “When they brought you to me, ten days old, I couldn’t believe you were finally mine. I was so grateful. You were like a little bundle that had just fallen from the heavens. And I thought, Jude. In Hebrew, it means ‘Praise.’ Or ‘Thanks.’ ”

Harriet gave his hands a squeeze, and Jude, his blue eyes swimming back—or ahead—to some memory or dream she might never know about, squeezed back.

He had come home, and he would leave and come home and leave and come home again, with new scars and tattoos, but now he let her hold on to his two fragile arms, the limbs that might have been broken had he been home last Saturday evening, when five boys had knocked on the front door. Most were thick-necked football players in their jerseys. One was the dark-eyed boy who had knocked on her door with Hippie several months ago—though Hippie wasn’t here now—before the incident in her greenhouse. His knee was clamped into a brace, and he was fondling the handle of a wooden cane. Harriet did not care to know the details of the neighborhood wars that had sent Jude running. But perhaps it was this injury, she dared to wonder, that had prevented this gang from making their counterattack in a timelier manner.

“Is Jude home?” he’d asked, like any of the boys, in recent days, who’d come over to raid her fridge.

But this time Harriet had not moved aside. The hairs on the back of her neck had gone cool. And then Bob had come downstairs, the gun he never wore holstered now across his shoulders and under his armpit in one of those equestrian contraptions that made him look like a soap opera police chief. Maybe it was the moment she’d fallen in love, when he’d leaned silently, smilingly against the doorframe and slipped his arm around her waist. “No, he’s not,” she told the boys.

“Where is everyone?” Jude asked now, withdrawing his hands from hers. “I heard about your . . . man friend.”

“Bob,” she said, trying not to smile. “Bob’s on a job this morning.”

“What’s with Bob? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Bob’s cool,” said Prudence, who was leaning in the doorway in a towel. “He plays the pan flute, and he can say the Gettysburg Address backwards.”

Jude sat up. “Why would anyone want to say it frontwards?”

Bob came over for dinner. Bob made seven-spice couscous with the green beans and tomatoes from Harriet’s garden. He’d picked up the recipe in Casablanca, where he’d tracked a woman who’d married some rich guy and then emptied his accounts. He’d tracked a guy who’d stolen a helicopter, tenants who’d jumped rent, and an underground cockfighting league, run in a number of Bronx basements. He was done with that wretched place called New York. Two weekends after setting foot in Vermont, he’d moved his sick mother out of their condo and up to a cabin on the lake. And he started every other sentence with the word happily. “Happily, I was able to track down the no-good crook.” “Happily, they had a whole batch of fresh mint.” But he called Jude’s mom “honey” and she called him “honey” back. At one point, he took off her glasses, buffed them on his apron, and slipped them back on her face.

Jude and Prudence did the dishes. Jude washed, Prudence dried. Eliza lay on the couch, her wet bikini still dampening her dress from her swim in the lake that afternoon. “I just want to be weightless,” she’d said. Now Bob was doing hypnotherapy on her, showing her how to put herself to sleep. Prudence told Jude that Tory Ventura and Missy Sherman had broken up, that he was off crutches, and that he’d gotten a football scholarship to Duke. He’d be leaving town within a matter of days. Jude tried to conceal his relief.

“Did you miss me?” he asked his sister. One of the cats—Tarzan—mashed his face into Jude’s shin.

“Yeah, it was really lonely not having someone trying to run my life all the time.”

“Are you still smoking?” Jude handed her a plate.

“Just crack. And just when I’m drinking.”

“Clearly you need my male influence.”

“I’ve got Bob,” Prudence said.

“What’s Bob going to do? Hypnotize you?”

“Mom said it really works. He’s got her down to like half a pack a day.”

Jude submerged his hands in the suds. Maybe his mom would be okay without him. She had Bob now.

“Pru, what if I stayed in New York?”

“With Dad?”

“Want to come with?” He lifted his hands out of the water, scrubbing another plate. He rinsed it and handed it over. “Give him a chance. Let him spend lots of money on you trying to buy back your love.”

“Are you taking the cats?”

“I think the cats are staying put.”

Prudence polished the plate with the tattered dishrag. Jude held another dripping plate while she placed it on the rack. “Maybe I’d visit,” she said.

“You could take the train,” said Jude.

After Bob had gone home and Harriet and Prudence had gone to bed, Jude unlocked the greenhouse with the key his mother kept in the fake rock in her garden. This was the darkened scene Tory had entered when he’d broken in, and Jude felt his ghost, still fresh, as well as Les’s. Along with the sear of Harriet’s burnt glass, the place smelled faintly of his pot. The old sleeping bag, in which Jude had received the news of his adoption, happened to be sitting in the lap of the rocking chair from which Les had delivered it. Jude lifted it—army green, hugged by a bungee cord—and sank his chin into its center.

“Can people see in here?” Eliza asked, pointing up to the painted glass ceiling.

“Just the lights,” Jude said, but he didn’t want his mother to see even that. He locked the door. With his flashlight, he found the melted stump of a candle and lit it.

Eliza walked over to one of the fish tanks that housed Harriet’s glass. She took out a bong and pretended to hit it. “Mmm,” she said, blowing out a mouthful of imaginary smoke.

“Funny,” said Jude.

He slid the old mattress leaning against the wall onto the floor, then uncoiled the sleeping bag, unzipped it, and spread it open across their bed. He felt dizzy, as though he were made of a gas. He pulled his shirt over his head, tossed it in the rocking chair, and lay down. Eliza followed him, coming down knee by knee, then hand by hand. They lay on their backs, side by side.

“We’re like old people,” Jude said.

“I feel all googly from that hypnosis stuff.”

“Googly?”

“Like, relaxed.”

He reached for her hand and fit it in his. The candle puddled a yellow light across the floor, over their legs. He couldn’t see anything beyond the painted glass ceiling, but he could imagine the stars coming out on the other side, bright as they were only here, millions of miles from any city.

“Is she going to hate me?” she asked.

They stared up at the underbelly of the roof, dark as a womb.

“Who?”

“Annabel.”

Jude closed his eyes. He thought of all the people who had done this before him, lain beside another body, seeking its warmth, like the two figures in the diagram his mother had drawn for him years ago. Queen Bea and Ravi, Harriet and Les, Johnny and Rooster. His unnamed mother and unnamed father in some unnamed room. Eliza and Teddy. If this was the crime they’d committed, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. This was forgivable.

“No,” he said, opening his eyes. “She’s just going to miss you.”

There were no eyes upon them. They were alone. He leaned on an elbow, close enough to kiss her, and then he did. He put his hand on the nape of her naked head. She did the same. Outside, the crickets pulsed.

“Is this why you brought me back to Vermont?” she asked. “So you could take advantage of me in the bong house?”

“It was my master plan.”

They kissed again. His fingers tangled in the bow of her bikini top. His hands were shaking. He leaned closer. His weight pressed over hers. Her dress was soggy with sweat. Or lake water. Or maybe something else. He didn’t care.

“Hold on,” she said.

“What?”

“My back.”

She struggled to sit up. He sat up with her. She was frozen for a few seconds, her legs straight in front of her.

“You okay?”

“I’m not supposed to lie flat. It puts pressure on a vein or something.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. Her face was in shadow. “Did you think your first time was going to be with a pregnant bald girl?”

“What?” he said, smiling, embarrassed, not knowing what to say. “It’s good.”

“It’s good,” she agreed.

They kissed sitting up for a while, and then she pressed his shoulders back down to the floor, and then, slowly, ploddingly, she straddled him, tucking her knees against his ribs. Now she was inside the ring of the candle’s light. In one motion she peeled off her damp dress and in two more she untied the strings at her back.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said. Her belly was a white moon floating on the lake. Between her breasts, her necklace flashed.

In the morning, they started in the garden, scattering handfuls like seeds. Then three rights and a left to Teddy’s. They crawled under the house, tossed a handful there, too, into the dirt and sparse grass, over the softened shards of green bottles stubbled with sand. Under the football stadium, down Ash Street, across the high school lawn, they shook out Teddy’s ashes from the plastic bags in their pockets, a trail of bread crumbs like a map of Lintonburg. The lake glittered on the mirrors of Eliza’s sunglasses. From the stone wall that edged the park, Jude could see down into the tops of the trees on the shore, into their knotted brains, the variegated greens of their leaves. He couldn’t help but think of the woolly thatch of hair between Eliza’s legs, but for the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much that didn’t remind him of sex. The knobs on his dresser drawers were twistable nipples. The emergency brake, over which he’d leaned to kiss her, a giant erect dick. The soda straw squeaking in and out of the X poked in the plastic lid of the cup passed between them, her spit mingling with his, the molecules of their bodies clinging invisibly to one another: sex.

There was one more place to go. On the ferry to Plattsburgh, the upper deck was filled with families and couples, summer campers in red T-shirts, fathers with cameras strung around their necks, mothers holding on to their children’s elbows as they leaned over the railing, hoping to steal a sight of Champ. The water and the sky and the mountains were so blue they were almost transparent, a holograph transmitted from space. It was a nearly windless day.

When they had pulled away from the dock, when the trees on the shore were no longer individual trees, they found the quietest corner of the boat, and Jude took the last plastic bag from his pocket. It was a little smaller than the plastic bag of pot he’d stolen, which his mother had flushed, leaving its heartbreaking dust behind. When Jude emptied the ashes over the railing, they didn’t scatter in the breeze, or splash. Somewhere between the boat and the surface of the lake, they simply disappeared, soundlessly, swallowed by the air.

In an hour they reached New York, and the passengers filed out of the ferry and onto the dock, heading for the Ethan Allen Homestead or Port Kent. Eliza and Jude remained on the upper deck, their twin scalps gleaming in the sun, holding hands because they didn’t know what else to do. They weren’t going to the other side, Jude told the woman who approached them, concerned, as if they were small children. They were just taking a ride.