“Hey,” I whisper. “Why’re you still shaking? It’s okay. We’re out of there now. Those psychos are history. They’re not thinking about us at all anymore.” I wrap my cold fingers around the figurine and bring him down against my chest. My heart feels like a tiny, untethered ball knocking around under my rib cage. “It’s okay, little guy. It’s okay. Deep breaths, remember? In and out. In and out.” The sun, a bright lemon disk, warms the cold skin on my face and legs. “In and out, George. That’s it. In. And. Out.” My arm, heavy as a log suddenly, sinks down across my eyes.
I try not to think about it, but the whole Regulation Room scene unreels itself like a movie in my head. Emmanuel’s thin lips loom in front of me, followed by Veronica’s ice-blue eyes. I can’t stand Emmanuel, but I hate Veronica with an intensity that frightens even me. I hate that she is beautiful, not because I’m jealous, but because her beauty has been wasted. No one as mean as Veronica deserves to carry around a face like that. She has milky white skin, a high forehead, and large, perfectly round blue eyes. Agnes says they are the color of sapphires. I think they are the color of death. I also hate that she is the only person in this place—aside from Emmanuel—who doesn’t have to play by the rules. As the queen of Mount Blessing, she calls her own shots—no questions asked. She doesn’t want to wear her robe one day? Fine. She wants to buy a television for Emmanuel’s room, even though all electronics are forbidden at Mount Blessing? No problem! In fact, why not buy a gigantic color television that will hang on the wall of Emmanuel’s room like a fish tank?
I hate that she is cruel. Not cruel like Emmanuel. Emmanuel’s cruelty is freakish, something almost inhuman. Part of me wonders if he was just born that way, that maybe he doesn’t even have a choice. Veronica, on the other hand, is a whole other deal. She’s learned how to be cruel over the years, and the more powerful she’s become, the meaner she’s gotten. She used to leave Emmanuel’s room whenever one of us kids was brought in to be interrogated. Eventually she got to the point where she could stay, but with her eyes riveted on the floor and her fists clenched in her lap. Pretty soon, though, she was participating in the question-and-answer drills, even interrupting Emmanuel at times to ask us to “clarify” something further. Now she even takes over occasionally in the Regulation Room, the way she did this morning. Despite all this, everyone still considers her to be on the same level with the Blessed Virgin Mary. It makes me want to puke when I think about it.
But most of all, I hate that the Believers here refer to her as the mother of this place. As far as I’m concerned, the words “Veronica” and “mother” should never be in the same sentence. Yeah, I know my own mother ran off and left me, so what do I know about mothers, right? I guess I should be grateful that I have some kind of pseudomother stand-in at all. Well, I’m not. I might not know anything about what having a mother feels like, but I’ll tell you what: I do know what having a bad mother feels like. And I’d bet my life that having a bad mother is worse than not having any mother at all.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but the next thing I know, Agnes is snuggling in next to me, exactly the way we used to when we were kids sharing the same crib in the nursery. Her breath is soft as a rose petal against the back of my neck. Something inside my chest swells as our breathing aligns itself. For a moment it feels as though the old Agnes, the one I’ve known since we were born, is back. The new Agnes, who seems to have sprung whole and fully formed from inside the bowels of Emmanuel’s room after he presented her with that freaky The Saints’ Way book on her birthday, just doesn’t do things like that anymore. (I didn’t get the book on my birthday, which is two weeks after Agnes’s. Agnes was all upset for me, but I told her to relax. Emmanuel probably thinks it would be wasted on me and for once he’d be absolutely right. I’d probably burn the damn thing if I got it.) I hardly recognize Agnes anymore. Now, as if the rules we have to follow here aren’t enough, she has become completely obsessed with becoming an actual saint. She walks around with this glazed expression on her face, mumbling prayers under her breath, trying to be perfect. Half the time she doesn’t even eat.