And the voice had said: Sure.
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. As he plunges, she knows that she could do it. That she has the strength, and perhaps she has had it enough for weeks or months, but only now is she certain. She can do it now and leave no possibility of misfires or reprisals. It seems the simplest thing in the world, like reaching out a hand and flicking off a light switch. She cannot think why she hasn’t decided to turn out this old light before.
She says to the voice: It’s now, isn’t it?
The voice says: You know it.
There is a smell like rain in the room. So that Mr Montgomery-Taylor looks up, thinks that the rain has started at last, that the parched earth is drinking it in great gulps. He thinks it might be coming in through the window, but his heart is gladdened by the thought of rain even as he continues with his business. Allie brings her hands to his temples, left and right. She feels the palms of her mother around her own small fingers. She is glad Mr Montgomery-Taylor is not looking at her but instead out through the window, searching for the non-existent rain.
She maketh a channel for the thunderbolt and setteth a path for the storm.
There is a flash of white light. A flicker of silver across his forehead and around his mouth and his teeth. He spasms and pops out of her. He is juddering and fitting. His jaws are clattering together. He falls to the floor with a loud thump and Allie is afraid that Mrs Montgomery-Taylor might have heard something, but she has the radio turned up loud, so there is no foot on the stair and no voice calling. Allie pulls up her underwear and her jeans. She leans over to watch. There’s a red foam at his lips. His spine is curled backwards, his hands held like claws. It looks like he’s still breathing. She thinks: I could call someone now, and maybe he’d live. So she puts her palm over his heart and gathers the handful of lightning she has left. She sends it into him right there, in the place where human beings are made of electrical rhythm. And he stops.
She gathers a few things from the room. Money she’d stashed in a spot under the windowsill, a few bucks, enough for now. A battery radio Mrs Montgomery-Taylor had had as a girl and had given her in one of those moments of kindness that serve to cloud over and obscure even the simple purity of suffering. She leaves her phone, because she’s heard those things can be traced. She glances at the little ivory Christ impaled on a mahogany cross on the wall at the head of her bed.
Take it, says the voice.
Have I done well? says Allie. Are you proud of me?
Oh so proud, daughter. And you will make me prouder yet. You will do wonders in the world.
Allie thrusts the little crucifix into her duffel bag. She has always known she must never tell anyone about the voice. She’s good at keeping secrets.
Allie looks at Mr Montgomery-Taylor one last time before she levers herself out of the window. Perhaps he didn’t know what hit him. She hopes he did. She wishes she could have sent him alive into the scalding tank.
She thinks, as she drops down from the trellis and crosses the back lawn, that maybe she should have tried to filch a knife from the kitchen before she left. But then she remembers – and the thought makes her laugh – that aside from cutting her dinner she really has no need for a knife, no need at all.
Three images of the Holy Mother, approximately five hundred years old.
Found in a dig in South Sudan.
NINE YEARS TO GO
* * *
Allie
She walks and hides, hides and walks for eighty-two days. Takes rides where she can, but mostly walks.
To start with, there’s not much trouble finding someone willing to give a sixteen-year-old girl a ride, criss-crossing the state, covering her tracks. But as she travels north and as the summer turns to autumn, fewer drivers answer her stuck-out hitching thumb. More of them swerve, panicked, away from her, even though she’s not in the highway. One woman makes the sign of the cross as her husband drives on.
Allie bought a sleeping bag early on from Goodwill. It smells but she airs it out every morning and it hasn’t rained hard yet. She’s been enjoying the journey, though her belly is empty most of the time and her feet are sore. There have been mornings she’s woken just past dawn and seen the hard, bright edges of the trees and path drawn fresh by the morning sun and felt the light glittering in her lungs and she’s been glad to be there. Once, there was a grey fox that kept pace with her for three days, walking a few arm lengths away, never coming close enough to touch but never drifting too far away either, except to take a rat once, returning with the body soft in her mouth and the blood on her muzzle.
Allie said to the voice: Is she a sign? And the voice said: Oh yes. Keep on trucking, girl.
Allie hasn’t been reading the newspapers and she hasn’t been listening to her little radio. She doesn’t know it, but she’s missed the Day of the Girls completely. She doesn’t know that that’s what’s saved her life.
Back in Jacksonville, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor walked upstairs at bedtime, expecting to find her husband in his study reading the paper and the girl suitably chastened on the subject of her misdeeds. In the girl’s bedroom, she saw what was to be seen. Allie had left Mr Montgomery-Taylor with his pants around his ankles, his member still partially tumescent, a bloody foam staining the cream rug. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor sat on the rumpled bed for a full half-hour, just looking at Clyde Montgomery-Taylor. She breathed – after a first quick gasp – slowly and evenly. The Lord giveth, she said to the empty room at last, and the Lord taketh away. She pulled Clyde’s pants up and remade the bed with fresh linens, being careful to step around him. She thought of propping him up in a chair at his desk and laundering the rug, but although she grieved for the indignity of him there, tonguing the floor, she doubted she had the strength for it. Besides, the story told itself better if he’d been in the girl’s room, delivering the catechism.