The Arms of God: A Novel

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  A Reading Group Guide

  Also by Lynne Hinton

  Praise for The Arms of God

  Copyright

  FOR MY HUSBAND, BOB BRANARD,

  LIGHT OF MY LIFE,

  KEEPER OF MY DREAMS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The writer’s path bears surprising curves, steep hills, and unexpected delays. I faced a difficult part of my journey when I was released from my former publisher. It was a stretch of disappointment for which I was unprepared. During that time of facing my losses, trying to regroup, and setting out again, I was cared for and supported by many dear souls. I am most grateful for my agent and my friend, Sally McMillan, who pulled me up and through those dark days. I have a husband whose love never wavered even when I was so much less than loveable. I had constant attention from those friends and family members who kept encouraging me to keep walking and to keep writing. Thank you to everyone who journeyed with me during that year.

  Finally, I headed in a new direction when Linda McFall of St. Martin’s Press offered me a place to share my stories. Thank you, Linda, for taking a chance on me. Thank you to the people at St. Martin’s for giving this book its voice.

  I gratefully acknowledge that my life is blessed, that this writer’s path, though difficult at times, is still the only path I would choose, and though there have been more than a few lonesome hours, there has never been a part of this journey where I have had to walk alone.

  Once in a while when the earth comes cold

  you’ll spot a place of sun;

  and before your eyes can look away

  the rest of you will run

  straight into that blast of red

  that is someone’s angry pain;

  you’ll stand for just a second

  and warm, remember her again.

  —ES

  Prologue

  Olivia is dead. I was shelling peas when the phone rang. Thinking about Anna and her fight with the little Thompson boy. Remembering how troublesome the world can be to a ten-year-old girl. Wondering what her father might have told her. Smiling that we got through the Thompson boy crisis just like all the others without hand or handout from the person she used to call Daddy. Thinking about the man next door, Richard, Rick, and how the swamp maple tree in the front yard grew ripe with red flowers early, the first day of spring, the day he moved in. Thinking about shelling peas and how my fingers were going to be stained. Blue-green like the bruise under Anna’s eye.

  Anna has her grandmother’s eyes. Brown as the earth. Dark with a light and a sadness both at the same time. A riverbed of muddied gladness with an unexpected appreciation for grief. I knew they were familiar the first time I fell into them; but I didn’t know why until I dropped down again into the other pair, the older pair, when I opened my front door to the old woman standing on my porch three weeks ago.

  She waited there, lost and found, broken and set, the sun balanced across her shoulders; and I saw her mark upon my daughter when she lifted up her head and swallowed me up with that vision. I knew and didn’t know, fell and got back up, all at the same time.

  I had been in the kitchen that day too. It was Saturday and I was capping late strawberries, making freezer jam. I was pleased with myself, finding the time to go to Murray’s Patch, pick a couple of gallons of ripe berries, sort and clean them, and then make the breakfast syrup that Anna loves to pour over her biscuits. I was planning to take a quart to Rick, an easy way of thanking him for fixing the leak underneath the house, an innocent means of seeing him again. When the doorbell rang my hands were sticky and I was smiling; and I pulled the door open using my elbows, my lips stretched across my teeth. I think I must have hoped for company.

  And there she was. And there were those eyes, those eyes of my child now set into the face of an old woman. And there was the flood of memory.

  It was no more than a split second of time, a moment moving forward and back, crashing together. And I realized just in the wake of the news of her death that it was in that split second that it happened. Something too familiar to be a dream stared up at me and broke through a wall that had been built across the low corners of my mind.

  The movement was as quick as lightning and just as red-hot. It swirled into that sticky-fingered second and I found myself falling down into a time long forgotten, a time held away and squeezed aside; and I blinked hard and circled, emptying myself into a one-worded question of “Yes?”

  Trying to forget where those eyes had taken me. Trying to act like nothing had slipped and fallen. Trying to forget that the lost memories and the hopes of a child could settle down deep beneath the heart of a woman and be raised up so quickly by just a glance. Trying to pretend to myself and to this familiar stranger that I never harbored an ache or that I recognized the eyes; and rather it was only a tiny lapse of imagination that shifted the thick barricade of bricks that had been stacked hard against my secrets. Trying to return to the order of a woman standing on my front porch and the bloodlike glaze dripping from my fingers.

  I pulled up the apron and wiped my hands, the door resting against my left hip. I neither moved near her nor retreated. I only watched and waited as she pushed a piece of hair from her face, placing it behind her ear, delicate, like a girl in love, and then finally whispered my name as if it were the medicine she needed for pain. And when she looked up again, having dropped her face and then lifted her eyes again to me, I knew even then that her dying could do nothing to me like her coming did. So that is why I was surprised when I hung up the phone after the call from the emergency-room doctor and found that a tear had moistened my lip.

  I took my time getting to the hospital. I straightened up the kitchen as I sorted through the details of what was passing over me. I threw out the hulls, put the peas in a tight plastic bag, setting them on the shelf in the refrigerator. I wiped down the table and even washed the bowls. Then I dried and placed them on the lazy Susan after I rearranged the other plastic containers that were unstacked and in disarray, glad to have the opportunity to take care of the task I had put aside for months. I emptied out the dishwater and cleaned out the sink with 409 and a sponge. Then I swept the floor, the broom pulled across every space, reaching into corners and under cabinets. I almost decided to mop but then thought better of it.

  The truth was I did not want to go to her bedside. I did not desire the role of family member to a dead woman. I did not want to fill out the forms and sign the papers. After all, I had only just met my mother twenty days before, only just learned how to call her name and what time she was accustomed to eating her meals, what afternoon of the week we might expect her to drop by and how carefully she chose her words.

  I was completely unprepared with how to be in control of her belongings, how to label her dying, how to finish her life. And I wondered as I slid the dirt and hulls and strings into the dustpan and then threw them into the trash can, how does a daughter claim the lost body
of a forgotten parent, plan a service of remembrance, act bereaved when the reunion had only barely begun?

  How does a child tell the doctor the medical history she doesn’t know? Respond with the appropriate grief and sadness? Know exactly which church to call, what hopeful songs to sing, and what death clothes to dress her in? I’d think of one question and five more would follow. So I spent another thirty minutes going through the kitchen, arranging boxes and bowls in the pantry and cabinets, and then finally calling Rick to ask him if he’d stay with Anna when she got home from her soccer practice.

  “You okay?” he asked, after answering that he would be happy to babysit. I could hear the music in the background, the oldies station playing some Beach Boys tune. I closed my eyes and could see the calm light in his smile, feel the gentle sweep of his fingers across the back of my neck.

  “I don’t know,” I responded.

  There was a pause. He waited.

  “Do you want me to explain anything to Anna?” he asked. I could hear him turn the volume down on his radio.

  I hadn’t thought about telling Anna. I hadn’t considered how I would explain this to her.

  “No,” I said. “Just say that I had an important errand to run. I’ll tell her about it later.”

  He hesitated again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this has been confusing for you.”

  And I took a breath, remembering the way I had stumbled over an explanation for who Olivia was when he dropped by one evening while she was visiting.

  “It’s complicated,” I told him the next day as we stood inside the row of dogwood trees that bordered our properties. “I haven’t seen or heard from my mother in a very long time.” The sunlight danced through the full and tender branches stretching around us.

  “All families are complicated,” he said and he reached behind my ear and pulled a narrow limb close to my face, a fine white flower falling below my eyes. He held it there, letting the petals rest against the bridge of my nose, and then he let the limb loose. It snapped gently back in place. Then he smiled and we had not spoken of Olivia again.

  “Thanks, Rick,” I said and we hung up.

  I drove to the hospital thinking about my daughter and how I would tell her of her grandmother’s passing and remembered the other conversation I had trying to explain about my mother, the one I had with Anna after Olivia ate dinner with us for the first time.

  “Miss Olivia is your mother?” she asked.

  I hummed the answer while I paid bills at the kitchen table. I was using the calculator. I was wearing my glasses.

  “How come I never saw her before?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying not to be distracted from the task at hand, trying not to get tangled in a ten-year-old’s line of questioning, trying not to ask myself the same thing.

  “You haven’t seen her in a long time?”

  “No, not for a long time.” The electric bill was high for a spring season. I punched in the number, watching my checking account dwindle.

  I felt Anna staring at me. I felt her eyes, her pity. I sighed, knowing the hard one was coming.

  “Where’s she been all this time?”

  I pulled off my glasses and slid the chair away from the table. I dropped my hands in my lap. I breathed in and I breathed out. I closed my eyes and opened them. I turned toward my daughter and answered her. “Anna, I don’t know.”

  And my ten-year-old child, the daughter bearing such a resemblance to her newly arrived grandmother, the one who had delivered me from loneliness a decade earlier, the one who did not flinch from truth, nodded like she understood.

  She jumped down from the countertop where she had been sitting, patted me on my arm like she was suddenly the grownup, and then, like Rick, didn’t ask anything else. She went into the den to watch television while I sat alone with what had and had not been revealed. I sat alone with the only story I knew to tell but didn’t.

  In the summer when I was four Olivia walked with me on a Tuesday to Miss Kathy’s Play Care Center, the big white house with a fenced-in yard, where I stayed every weekday while she worked. I did not take note that the day was starting out differently from any other day. It was Tuesday and that meant swim day, bologna sandwich day, and that Miss Kathy’s daughter, having worked the late shift on Monday night, would still be sleeping when we arrived. We began every Tuesday morning playing quietly outside.

  I had not noticed Olivia’s red puffy eyes or the long desperate way she hugged me at the door. I had not asked about the bag of my clothes that she left behind the coat tree or the five dollars she pinned inside the front zippered pocket of my blue striped overalls. I had not determined anything curious or different about my mother. I left her side and ran to the backyard where three or four other children were already playing.

  The sun was rising, high and hot, and Miss Kathy was wearing her green dress, the one with tiny yellow flowers that danced like bees across her chest every time she moved. Through the window in the door I watched her walk away from the sink, drying her hands as she spoke to my mother, and I imagined there was the sound of humming following her, the sounds I had heard in ripe, full gardens.

  Olivia raised her hand, a kiss gently placed upon her fingers and then sent to me with a smile like she did every morning. I waved back and then forgot her, simply and easily forgot her, thinking only of having my turn on the tire swing that Miss Kathy’s husband had hung from the fat arm of the cottonwood tree and wishing it was already time to swim.

  I did not worry that anything was wrong late in the afternoon when everyone else left, mothers grinning and waiting for their children at the curb or on the porch. I did not peer from the front window or stay seated near the door. The sun dropped and I still did not become upset. After supper I spent the night watching cartoons and eating ice cream with Miss Kathy’s daughter while her mother watched from the table in the kitchen, her face pinched and bothered. I fell asleep on the sofa in the den, listening to the whispers and finally starting to feel only slightly concerned that something was not right.

  The following afternoon when the two police officers arrived and the skinny lady in a tight blue suit asked me if my mother had said anything to me about where she might have gone, I still did not believe that things were any different than they had been for the first four years of my life.

  Even as I rode away, sitting in the front seat of a squad car, the other children watching from Miss Kathy’s front yard, tops of heads and tight plump fingers lining the fence, I did not consider that my mother was never coming back. I thought it was only a misunderstanding, a mistake that would quickly be remedied, that things were as they should be. I was, after all, only four; I had not yet made space in my life for gross disappointment. Little did I understand how unsettled I would soon become bearing the consequences of the occasion of my mother’s disappearance. Little did I know how unsorted my life was about to be.

  The hospital was not far from the house where Anna and I lived. It was a big sprawling building with lots of informational signs. There was a visitors parking garage, two lots for day patients and staff, and a small designated lot for the emergency department that was tucked behind the new cancer center, marked with large red letters. I knew which side of the hospital it was on because of the few times I had taken Anna. A high temperature, a twisted ankle, a rash from some kind of poison, we had made our rounds to Saint Vincent’s.

  Once when Anna was a baby, John had gone with me. Anna had developed a cough, deep and raspy like an old smoker. It was croup; and together John and I stayed with her, he and I drinking cups of black coffee and nibbling on vending machine snacks while Anna slept fitfully beneath an oxygen tent.

  He was a husband then, to me, not to the college coed he now lived with on the edge of town. He was a father to Anna, doting and concerned, tearful and guilt-ridden that he might have caused her illness because he had not wrapped her in her blanket on the night we sat and counted the stars. He was not yet distracted and
busy by his teaching obligations or wrapped up in the life of another woman. He loved me then but he left me too, just like my mother.

  His departure was just as quick, just as premeditated; but unlike hers, I knew he was leaving. From the very beginning of our marriage I was ready for his disappearance. I knew he would go.

  That was the trickiest part of Olivia’s leaving. That has been the thing I have never set loose. Once I realized what had happened, once I understood the permanence of what had occurred, that I had grown up without her, I simply expected that my mother was only the first of many departures.

  I assumed that since she had left me, that since she had packed me a bag and given me five dollars, that since she had made a plan to drop me off at Miss Kathy’s and never come back, that everyone else was making a way to leave me too. I’m still haunted by trying to figure out who’s going next, how my daughter will also one day soon fall away, how Rick, even though he bears no resemblance to my ex-husband, will also follow the growing line of those checking out of my life.

  I walked slowly from the parking lot to the entrance, the sliding-glass doors opening as I stood just under the overhang. There was an older woman at the front desk. She was talking on the phone, the receiver at her ear. I waited politely. She slipped the mouthpiece down past her chin and said, “I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  She was nice enough; but I could feel her sizing me up, taking in the clues as to whether I was sick or hurt, whether I would pay for the visit or be the next charity case. She studied me while she listened to the person on the other end of the phone.

  “Yes, the mouse is stuck. I can’t turn it on, can’t turn it off,” she explained.

  It was computer problems. From my own work as a secretary at the business office at the college I knew the symptoms. Finally, after telling this a few times to first one person, then another, she hung up.

  “Computers,” she said, “can’t live with them, can’t shoot them!”