The Sky Beneath My Feet, page 11
“I’m glad you came,” I say.
“Really?”
“I’ve been thinking about old times. You remember Miss Hannah?”
“How could I forget? She had a glare that would take the paint off a barn.”
“Well, she never used it on me. I was remembering the other day about that place she took me, the meetinghouse with the opening in the roof.”
“Ah, right. Did you ever figure out where it was?”
I shake my head. “If it weren’t for that vivid memory of her stretching out on the bench, I’d tell myself it was all in my imagination.”
“Have you been reliving more episodes from your past?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s about that time. Your midlife crisis. I’d say you’re pretty much overdue.”
“Ha.” A midlife crisis. If only he knew. There’s a crisis in the family, no question about that, but it isn’t mine. “Gregory, you’re going to find out soon enough, so I might as well tell you. You asked when Rick was coming home and I told you not to worry about it. That’s because Rick is home. He’s living in the shed in the backyard.”
“He’s what?”
“I didn’t put him there, if that’s what you’re thinking. He made the choice himself. He’s unfulfilled at work and conflicted about a new job offer he just received, so naturally he decided to wait for an answer from God. Meanwhile, he’s sequestered himself in the shed. As people do.”
“Right. Of course. This is the same Rick we’re talking about—my brother-in-law, the ultimate sportsman, deep as a ditch?”
“Not anymore. My neighbor thinks he’s becoming a mystic. I think she left an offering of flowers at his door.”
“Wow.” He stops in his tracks, takes his arm from my shoulder. “I mean, wow. Eliza, that’s weird. It’s, like . . . messed up. I’ve never even heard of something like that before. He’s really gone off the deep end?”
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment.”
“You seem pretty calm about it. I’d be freaking out.”
“Trust me, I’ve been freaking out. My son’s birthday is tomorrow, and as far as I know his father isn’t planning to be there. I have the keys to a beach house in Florida on my nightstand, I have permission slips to get the boys out of school, and I don’t have a husband anymore to go with me. I’m like a single mother all the sudden, except there’s a crazy man living in the backyard, sneaking into the house when I’m not around so he can go to the bathroom.”
“Liz,” he says. “Oh, Liz.”
“I know. And the really insane part is, I’m used to it now. It’s only been a couple of days and I really don’t miss him. The boys don’t either. They barely talk about him. But they’re afraid to bring anyone home, afraid their friends will find out.”
“Oh, Liz.” He puts his long arms around me and pulls my face into his chest. My shoulders heave, my cheeks burn wetly. I’m pumping tears into the fabric of his jacket. Letting go, drifting free. “Oh, Liz,” he’s saying, “oh, Liz, Liz, Liz,” over and over, a voice across the water calling me toward the distant shore. He holds me tight but I’m floating, my eyes prismed, floating off to the dissolving dark.
“Maybe,” he says, much later. “Maybe,” as we walk very slowly, side by side, pacing ourselves so we never make it home. “Maybe this isn’t about him.”
I wipe my hand over my face. I sniff. “What does that mean?”
“Maybe this isn’t his time, Liz. Maybe it’s yours.”
“My time to hear from God, you mean?” I give him a lopsided smile. “My time to find myself?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“I’m not into all that psychobabble. ‘Finding yourself.’ I never lost myself.”
“You didn’t? You could’ve fooled me.”
“Don’t talk,” I say. “You’re ruining the moment.”
“Sorry.” He gazes up at the whirling, faceted anarchy of the Smythes’ Victorian mansion, the moonlight shining dimly in the grimy leaded-glass windows. “Since I’ve already ruined it, I might as well say something else.”
“If you must.”
“You know that Eli’s smoking weed, right?”
“What?”
“I could smell it on him when he came in the house.”
chapter 8
Good Christian Lady
Definition of hypocrisy: this daydream I’m having, in which I slap a fat joint from Eli’s lips, snatch it in the air between my finger and thumb, and grind out the smoldering cherry in the middle of his peanut butter ice-cream cake.
Gregory drives, trying to munch down his McDonald’s hash browns before the grease melts through the bag. He doesn’t look over at me, knowing no good will come of it.
Shocking news plus a sleepless night plus an unwanted errand equals recipe for volcanic eruption.
If Gregory hadn’t arrived first thing, ringing the doorbell with his fast-food offering in hand, there would have been an eruption all right.
And where is his father? Cloistered away while his son puffs himself into a stupor. Is that where Eli goes every day after school? Is he being metaphorical when he calls it riding the trails? Is he laughing at me behind my back?
“You shouldn’t have told me,” I say.
“I gave you the red pill when you wanted the blue one. Or is it the other way around?”
“I’m serious.”
“What? It’s The Matrix. You don’t really think that ignorance is bliss. Anyway, you weren’t such a little teetotaler back in the day.”
“Neither were you.” Low blow. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No big deal. I can take it. Twelve years sober as of last month.”
“That’s great.”
“So you can understand why this means something to me, helping this girl.”
“I thought you liked the mom.”
“I do,” he says. “But it’s not just about the mom. Kind of hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to. I understand.”
“I’m not telling you to go easy on the kid. I wouldn’t. Nail him to the wall if that’s what it takes. Just wait until tomorrow. It’s his birthday, after all.”
“Do you think Jed knows?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. You knew when it was me.”
“What if he wasn’t the one smoking it? Maybe he was just around people who were smoking.”
“Could be,” he says, doubt in his voice. We’re taking the Jones Falls Expressway into town. Speeding one minute, sitting still the next. He drops the last hash brown wrapper into the bag and crumbles it into a white, damp ball, sailing the ball over his shoulder into the backseat: “Two points.”
“Last night might have been the first time,” I say. “Just because he smelled of pot doesn’t mean he’s a stoner.” The more I think about this theory, the more I like it. “The other day he saw a bunch of war protesters and called them ‘hippie losers.’ You wouldn’t say that if you were smoking, would you?”
“Hippie losers? No way. You’d say, ‘Hail brother, well met.’ Absolutely.”
“You’re no help.”
“Hey, I grassed on him, what more do you want? Get it—grassed?”
“Not funny.”
“No, it’s not. And now I’m dragging you into this mess.”
This mess. It sounds like a mess all right.
“What’s the girl’s name, anyway?”
“Her name is Samantha McCone. Sam.”
“And what is Sam’s story?”
“It’s not a nice one. She ran away when she was in her early teens. Her parents were divorced, and her mom had moved her here. I don’t know if drugs came into it before or after that, but she was missing for close to six months. Police brought her back. After that, behavior problems—you can imagine what it was like. I mean, how do you treat a kid who does something like that? But Sam got her act together in high school, graduated in May, and she was in my classroom three months later, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I’ve got a nose for it, and I didn’t sense anything with her. She seemed like a good kid. She was a good kid.”
“So what happened?”
“Same thing that always happens. You get weak, you get tempted, you relapse. Her mom says she started going into the city with these friends of hers, partying, not coming home until the next day. She didn’t want to come down too hard too fast—Sam is hypersensitive—but before she knew it, the girl was gone. That was three weeks ago.”
“When did she call home?”
“Sunday afternoon.”
While I was with the Rent-a-Mob, feeling sorry for myself. “You talked to her yesterday? And she said she wouldn’t go back.”
“She’d run out of drugs over the weekend. Between Sunday and yesterday, she must have scored some more.”
“And they let her stay in the halfway house?”
“It’s more like an asylum. You’ll see.”
If your knowledge of Baltimore jumps from Edgar Allan Poe to The Wire, you have a distorted view of the city, expecting it to be hip deep in drugs, bullets flying through the projects, tattooed thugs eyeballing you as your car rolls through the corner. It’s not that way, I tell people. Even the places that were like that are getting better all the time. There are Volvos parked along Patterson Park. Don’t believe everything you see, I tell them. I’m from Baltimore. I should know.
But Gregory takes me to the Baltimore I’m not from, the city I don’t know or even begin to recognize.
“This isn’t such a great neighborhood,” I say, watching two kids on a street corner bump hands, passing something back and forth. The closed store behind them is hidden under burglar bars, the glass underneath busted out.
“We’re not in Lutherville anymore. Don’t worry. If anybody gives you trouble, start sharing about Jesus and they’ll give you a wide berth.”
“I should have brought my fish.”
Gallows humor. I really don’t like the look of these streets. Long blocks of side-by-side row houses, every couple of facades boarded up and tagged with paint. Old sunbaked black men sitting on stoops, kids in long white muscle shirts running in front of the car with only a foot or two to spare, leaving Gregory to hit the brakes or run them over. At the intersections, lean young men in hoodies and puffed-out coats lean over for a look into the car.
“They’re just checking to see if we’re buying,” Gregory says. “It’s no big deal.”
His calmness reassures me a little. This is the real world. What looks risky to me is everyday life for many of God’s creatures.
“I envy your assurance,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t be a stranger to such places, after all.”
“Why not?”
“Jesus ate with the prostitutes and tax collectors. I’m on his team, married to one of his official servants, and in theory my life is meant to be more like his. I’m supposed to aspire to this kind of thing. But it makes me uncomfortable all the same. I guess I don’t have your affinity for the working class.”
“This isn’t the working class,” he says. “This is flat-out poverty. I don’t want any part of this, or the system that perpetuates it, any more than you do—” He breaks off. I sense there’s more he could say, but for some reason he doesn’t want to. He pretends to pay attention to the road. Finally, this: “In all honesty, I think my Marxism is about as theoretical as your Christianity. I want out of here as much as you.”
“And Sam? How did she end up in a place like this?”
He shrugs. “How does anyone end up in a place like this?”
The amazing thing is, we’ll pass a bunch of dealers hustling on the curb and one block up there’s a parked police car. You’d think they would at least move their action farther down. But these are the front lines, I guess. You don’t run away because the other side shows its head. If you’re in a battle, you stand your ground.
The streets teem with kids. Teens. Grade-schoolers. Running alone or in packs. Dribbling basketballs, snatching caps off each other’s heads and running down the block with them, their laughter incongruous to my ears given the surroundings, but natural enough to them. All of this must seem natural to them.
Eric Ringwald, Holly’s husband, returned from one of his trips to Haiti telling after-dinner stories about the children there. “They have nothing,” he would say, “absolutely nothing—and yet they seem so happy in comparison to us.” He meant it sincerely, and I’ve heard the same thing from many others returning from short-term mission trips: middle-class Americans lamenting their own inauthenticity in comparison to the impoverished and joyous urchins they saw abroad. Maybe I’m channeling my brother’s convictions here, but I can imagine Edwardian travelers returning from their gin-and-tonic-soaked holidays in Calcutta thinking much the same thing. I’ve never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Gregory says. “We’ll be out of here in no time.”
Maybe it should get to me. What kind of person would I be if it didn’t?
One rung above hell is how Gregory described the halfway house, and at first glance he appears to be right. Parking across the street, he unclips his seat belt, lets out a long sigh, and just sits there, working up the nerve to get out. This gives me a chance to look the place over. Mission Up sits at the end of a block of row houses, half of them boarded up and the other half looking like they should be. The tall, narrow facades make me think of a grade-schooler’s smile: you run your eyes left to right and keep hitting gaps where teeth are meant to be.
Once upon a time, thirty years ago at least, Mission Up might actually have been a large boardinghouse, one of those seedy flophouse kind of places you see in old movies, with the creepy attendant behind the counter and the room keys dangling on wall hooks. After that, it must have been boarded up for a long time and only recently pried open and repurposed. Calling it a halfway house gave me the impression of something official. This is anything but.
“It looks more like a squat,” I say.
But looking again, I notice some care has gone into this squat. The sign over the door is hand-painted in pink neon. The lettering is done with flair too, the o in Mission Up rendered as a smiley face. The trim on the ground-floor windows is picked out in the same bright pink. Even though the windows themselves are sheathed in what looks like chicken wire, if you give it a chance, Mission Up exudes a rude cheerfulness.
Gregory turns to me. “It’s not going to be easy getting in. We’ll have to talk our way past the nun.”
“The nun?”
“You’ll see. Just follow my lead.”
Stepping out of the car feels at first like walking on the moon. But the ground under my feet doesn’t give way, and the air is just as breathable as it is in the suburbs. By the time we’re across the street, I’m thinking I can do this. I want to. Beth may hesitate, but Eliza, the girl whose eyes sometimes look back at me in the mirror, would charge ahead.
Gregory knocks on the door. Up close, I can see faded pink detailing on the inset panels, more evidence of life within. After a pause, he knocks again, glancing over his shoulder.
“She’s a bit of a bear.”
The door opens and I see what he means. A wide-eyed black woman about five feet tall and five feet wide looms in the threshold, her bosom and belly conflated into a single roll that pushes on the buttons of her shiny polyester shirt. The collar has a notch of white at the throat, just like the one Deedee’s parish priest wears.
“What you—? Oh,” she says. “The professor come back.”
Not an ounce of hospitality in her voice. In fact, the way she says professor suggests the profoundest doubt that the man standing before her is any such thing. She says it with invisible quotes in the air, implying Gregory is an impostor.
Her eyes cut to me, glancing up and down in frank assessment. On her chest, a gold pectoral cross hangs, hugely out of proportion, its ends whirled with elaborate flourishes. It shines flatly and looks like spray-painted metal. She also wears a dozen or more tiny enamel badges of the sort men used to wear on their suit lapels. Knights of Columbus, a variety of crosses denoting holy orders I don’t recognize, tiny Bibles, tiny Virgins, tiny saints of various sorts. Like a general’s medals or a Boy Scout’s badges. There’s a lot of real estate to cover and she’s managed pretty well.
“Sister,” Gregory begins.
“Mother,” she says, correcting him.
“Mother, that’s right. Is it . . . Zacchaeus?”
His mouth has trouble tumbling out the syllables that emerged so smoothly from my own.
“Mother Zacchaeus,” she says, fixing him in her small, cold eyes. “You know perfectly well.”
“Well, look who I’ve brought!” He frames me with his hands, a magician’s gesture. “This is Sister Eliza, a good Christian lady, and when I told her about your wonderful establishment here, she insisted on seeing it for herself.”
“Hmm.” Mother Zacchaeus looks me over again. “You a good Christian lady?”
“Absolutely!” Gregory says in a bright, loud voice, talking to the nun like she’s hard of hearing or hard of understanding or both. It makes me wince to hear him condescending this way.
“We’re here to see Sam?” I say, turning the end of the statement into a question.
“I know why you here, good Christian lady. And you not coming in.”
Gregory leans into the threshold, and for a second I expect Mother Zacchaeus to deck him. Her torso twists and her hand cocks back, but at the last moment she merely grasps the edge of the door, holding it tightly. Short as she is, I have no doubt she could flatten my lanky brother, whose workout routine consists mainly of carrying a stack of books from his car to his office. Occasionally Deedee will tell me horror stories of the strict nuns of her Catholic youth, but those white-haired women had nothing on Mother Zacchaeus, I’m sure.
“You not coming in, and that is final, hear? This is a sanctuary, not a come-and-go-as-you-please.”
“Come on, Mother Zacchaeus. You have to allow visitors.”
