The Arms of God: A Novel Read online

  I smiled, trying to think of something sympathetic or witty to say in response but knowing I had nothing to offer her.

  “Now,” she exhaled, “how can I help you?” She pulled out a clipboard and began preparing the forms.

  “I was called.” I was hesitant in my reply. “Olivia Jacobs?” I asked, in hopes she would need no more explanation.

  She pursed her lips and crossed her brow. She had forgotten the dead woman who had been pushed against a corner in the last examining room. She had forgotten that they were waiting for the daughter, that the chaplain had come and gone, two, maybe three times, that the doctor who declared the woman dead had already left for the day.

  “Ah,” she said, remembering. “Let me call the nurse.”

  Then I felt her judge me again. Me, the family member, alone to see the dead mother. She was assessing my grief, deciding whether to page the chaplain, whether I was a weeper or a runner, potential trouble for the emergency-room staff.

  Hospital personnel hate weepers and runners, this I learned from overhearing a conversation of nurses while I waited for Anna’s X-ray when she was seven and turned her ankle chasing a neighbor’s dog.

  “Weepers are trouble for everybody,” one nurse explained to another, “and one can never be sure where a runner will run.” There was a tired sort of laughter that followed and I quit listening when the doctor walked in with the long black picture of my daughter’s bones.

  I put on my best face as the receptionist continued to measure me. This, I have learned, is a gift.

  After Olivia left me, I was placed in an emergency foster home and then later moved to a regular one. I lived with seven families from the time I was four until the time I was fifteen. Then I lived in a group home for teenage girls until I graduated from high school. I kept my clothes in a suitcase, my toys and other belongings in a bag, even when I was told which dresser drawers were mine and which side of the closet I could hang my things.

  I learned how to adapt to families who prayed at every meal and read the Bible and homeschooled the children as well as to families where you understood how to live carefully, with caution, how never to be alone with certain male adults. I learned how to get along with mean, selfish girls and what pleases but does not overwhelm the parents. I learned how to eat foods I had never before tasted and how to drink milk without getting sick. I figured things out quickly and by myself. I knew how to put on my best face.

  The nurse who came to walk me to the room where the dead woman lay was young and pretty. She wore a bright pink lab coat over a perfectly starched uniform. Her teeth were white and straight, her lips painted the same color as her nails, which were short and square. Her hair had been twisted into a fine knot that gathered at the nape of her neck. Blond strands highlighted the otherwise thick brown hair; and she was tall and slender, a woman who wore confidence as if it were born on her.

  “It must be hard to lose your mother,” she said smoothly. The line was well rehearsed and spoken with just the right amount of sympathy and concern.

  I nodded obediently as I followed her down the hall, wondering the entire way about which time she meant. I thought about the word “lose,” as in “lose your mother.” I thought of how it was a word that described my feelings for much of my childhood because for years I had thought that Olivia had been lost. I believed that she had been on her way back to find me, but that something had happened, a car wreck, a misdirected day trip, something spoiling her routine, and that she had gotten lost.

  My greatest fear, then, in moving from house to house, in changing my address, my new family’s last name, was that when she finally recovered herself and the way she was going, when she finally was no longer lost and knew she needed to pick me up, that she would not be able to find me. That then she would certainly be lost for good.

  “Is there somebody I can call for you?” the pretty young nurse asked.

  I noticed that her name was Heather. Heather Allan. I read it on the identification badge she wore clipped to her lapel. All the pretty girls were named Heather when I was a child. Heather and Dawn and Jennifer. My name is Alice. Worn-out and borrowed like a forgotten tool in a shed. Alice never wins a beauty pageant. Alice is never homecoming queen or head cheerleader. Alice is never called on for dates.

  I had always wanted to know where Olivia had gotten such a name for a baby girl, a name already old; but I was too young to think of it before she left and too lost to it when she came back.

  Growing up without any stories of an Alice, a headstrong and bold best friend from high school, a favorite aunt who married a younger man, a movie star, glamorous and mysterious, I had become the only Alice I knew to be. I was as weary as the name.

  I shook my head. I liked the way she talked to me even though she treated me as if I were younger than she. I liked the sweetness, the kindness she offered. It felt nice to have someone concerned about me since I recognized a long time ago that I live my life just out of reach of most people.

  “Then I’ll leave you here alone with your mother,” she replied.

  She touched me on the shoulder, lightly, not too intimately, but with a certain degree of familiarity. She pulled the curtain around us and walked quietly to the outside door and I suddenly found myself feeling awkward and unsure of what I should now say or do to the dead woman I met and remembered but did not know. I heard Heather clear her throat. Perhaps, I thought, she was waiting for a reply; but just as I had been with the receptionist and her frozen computer I could think of nothing else to say. I had no words for death and only a few memories.

  When I was six I had a special friend at the foster home named Crocus. She said her mother named her that because she had suddenly appeared like the spring flower in the dead of winter and that her mother had been so happy to see something new and alive in her life that she had named her the only flower she loved.

  Crocus was fourteen and she had lived in foster homes since her mother died when she was eight. Her father, she had reported during our first conversation, had never seen his daughter; and she had never known how he looked.

  She was smart and easy to be with. She taught me how to take care of myself and how to manage in the homes of others.

  “The real children will never accept you,” she said one day after the daughter of the foster parents told her mother I stole from her. “Just stay as far away from them and their things as you can. It’ll save you a lot of trouble.”

  I always thought that phrase “real children” had seemed odd when Crocus used it. But it didn’t take long before I understood the difference between the biological children of the foster parents and those of us who were let in because of charity or the need for a little extra household money. Most of the time the adults tried to keep things even among us, squared up and balanced; but it was always clear and definite among the children who belonged and who didn’t.

  Crocus and I never belonged.

  One day in winter everyone had gone out. It was one of the real children’s birthdays so there was quite a celebration planned. I was sick with fever and flu and Crocus was assigned to stay home and take care of me. She kept a cold wet cloth on my brow, my glass filled with orange juice, and talked to me about what she planned to do when she lived on her own. She was going to be a marine biologist and swim carelessly through the caves and coral in the oceans. She wanted to break the record for holding her breath underwater and she told me how it felt to her when she dove deep into the pool at the community center, breaking the water for the first time.

  “It’s like being born,” she said, a smile warming her face as she remembered the gift of summer, and then she talked about her experience with death.

  I closed my eyes and listened. My breath, heavy and hot, was the only thing that stirred from within me. I was as silent as a grave.

  “I have always felt I would be alone,” she confessed. “Even before she died.”

  I knew she was speaking about her mother.

  She talked
on, her voice so perfectly soothing. “When I saw her for the first time after she was dead, I was brought into the room at the funeral home with all of her family, most of whom I had never met. There must have been thirty people in there and I remember that they all hushed when my grandmother took me to her casket. I remember thinking that they shouldn’t be there, that they didn’t have the right to grieve my mother’s death, that they shouldn’t be standing around watching us while I told her good-bye. That what was happening was private and personal, just for us, and that they should leave.”

  She dipped the cloth in a pan of water and then again draped it across my head. I settled into her story, the wet compress covering my eyes.

  “But even in the midst of all those people, all those eyes staring at me, I decided that they couldn’t really see us.” I felt her hand press my brow. “I became a dark figure passing under a wave. And me and my mother, even in a room of people pretending to be family, watching us like they cared, we were together in the cold and bottomless sea, we were alone to ourselves.”

  I fell asleep to the sound of a daughter’s voice rocking me in and out of a fever, her memories of death, her story of living underwater. And I dreamed of fishing for my mother from a long wooden pier. I stood as bold and clearheaded as I had ever been. I was sure I could hook her with a strong, sturdy line.

  “You just come find me when you’re finished.” The voice of Nurse Heather was behind me. She closed the outside door, pulling me back to the moment at hand, the moment of Olivia, the moment of dealing with her passing. The curtain swung and fell and it was as still as winter.

  The room at the end of the hall in the emergency department was cold and without too much light. The far and side walls were thick, painted pale green, hardly masking the heaviness of the concrete; and though I had never been in one before, gave the feeling of being in a morgue. Silver instruments lined a table built into the wall that stood next to a cabinet with glass doors. Inside the case there were jars of cotton and boxes of bandages neatly displayed in rows.

  Three IV poles were pushed into a corner; and stacks of white linen and blue dotted gowns were neatly folded and placed on shelves next to the gurney. I stepped closer to the body. She was so still and calmed, so different from the tiny woman who crept into my life like a stray cat, wild and alone.

  She seemed older somehow, the gray in her skin enhanced by the white sterile sheet upon which she lay. She wore no makeup and displayed no shifting of facial features that give a person some animated youthfulness. There were no black lines drawn across the lids of her eyes, no rosy pink circles highlighting her cheeks. No smooth paint slowly applied to her thin lips, which in moments of disconcerting silence that often fell between us, she anxiously bit and slid behind the backs of her teeth.

  The gown hung loosely about her shoulders with sleeves, meant to be short, draped wide about her elbows. I thought how ready she looked for some news or some different face to greet her, how she had been caught waiting, and how she had finally sunk into the frame that supported her, melting into the whiteness of the fabric that held her in. Her peppered black hair spread across the pillow, still catching light and holding it like a person wide-eyed and alive.

  But Olivia was dead. She was lifeless, void of breath and memory, bereft of spirit. She had left everything she had known and been while living on the earth. Everything she had learned and treasured, everyone she had touched and been touched by, every collected and cherished moment when she counted herself as alive, was gone. And she was now completely and fully absent from it all.

  I suppose I thought I’d see only sorrow and disappointment in the face of Olivia, that look of regret. But as I stepped closer to the dead woman’s body, taking her long wiry fingers into mine, I recognized relief.

  Gone was the brittle edge of unknowingness that kept her jumpy and anxious. Missing was the quiet way she wore sadness, always close to the surface of a smile. No longer did she seem remorseful and broken, ashamed of something she never named, leaving me maybe. She was free of the mysterious past and relieved of what seemed to be a burdensome present. She no longer faced some unknown and tempestuous future. And although I hadn’t had a lot of experience studying dead people, Olivia certainly appeared to be at peace. She drew in a breath, still waiting, and politely death had arrived. She looked comfortable in its presence.

  Of course, I didn’t have a lot of memories to compare Olivia’s appearance to since the only other dead person I ever saw was Mrs. Pickett, the old foster mother I stayed with when I lived out on a farm. I was thirteen. There were five other children, two of them adopted, the other three fosters, a caretaker, Mr. Henry, who lived behind the house in the barn and only came around for Sunday dinner, and Mrs. Pickett’s retarded sister named Miss Lucy. I never asked about Mr. Pickett.

  Mrs. Pickett was nice enough. She was the best cook of any of the mothers I lived with. She was soft all over like biscuit dough and she had kind eyes. She adopted the two children when they were just babies and she took in foster children because she had been an orphan herself. “Back in the old hard days,” she would tell us, “when all the children lived together in a long, cold warehouse they called a dormitory.”

  She would tell us lots of stories about how they worked from early in the morning until late at night, how they were taught never to speak unless they were spoken to and even then with only simple replies, and how none of the children ever had anything that was their own. No toy, no dress, no pair of shoes, not even their undergarments were theirs to keep.

  “If you got attached to anything,” she’d tell us as she took us shopping, “the principal, Mr. Blackwell, would take it away from you.” She bought every child who lived with her two sets of clothes, one for church and parties, the other for school.

  “The first thing I did when I got out of that orphanage was buy myself a pair of black patent boots and a tiny doll with long silk hair.”

  We all knew the story and even knew where she kept the little doll, high on a shelf in the living room. She took it down sometimes for us to hold. “Every child should have at least one thing that’s theirs.” And she’d smile with satisfaction at all the stuff she bought us.

  Mrs. Pickett left the orphanage when she was eighteen. She found her sister in the hospital wing of the dormitory, tied to a bed. She wouldn’t tell any of Miss Lucy’s stories, only that nobody should have to live through what her sister did.

  Mrs. Pickett died from a stroke, the social worker told us. And suddenly, all five children and Miss Lucy were wards of the state. Nobody could find Mr. Henry when she died. The barn was swept clean and all his things were gone. The preacher from the church where she took us had a special service just for the children. And we all went up to her casket, one by one, while he helped us say a prayer.

  They had put too much makeup on her and she looked fake, her hair too curly and a forced smile drawn across her lips in a bright red shade that Mrs. Pickett would have never worn. She was swollen and squeezed inside the box, her arms pinched close beside her. One of the children, Mary Stella, an adopted one, the oldest, leaned over and kissed her dead mother on the lips and I remember thinking that the preacher better not make us all do that because I wasn’t about to kiss a dead person. I touched her on the arm only because one of the boys dared me. It felt hard and stiff, tensed as if she were trying to make a muscle.

  Miss Lucy curled herself up in a corner in the church fellowship hall. The social worker said that since she was retarded she couldn’t understand that her sister had died; but I knew her balled up like that was the purest picture of grief I would ever see. She was tight, like a knot, trying to pull her arms and legs inside herself and disappear. I knew what she was doing because I had tangled myself up like that a few times too. It was grief all right. Miss Lucy knew.

  Later, when the social worker came to take Miss Lucy to the state hospital, one of the foster children, May Anne, the young one, pulled a chair into the living room, stepped upo
n it, and took Mrs. Pickett’s tiny doll with the silk black hair from the top shelf. She jumped down and placed it in Miss Lucy’s hands.

  Miss Lucy held the doll like a child holds her favorite toy, ruined because of someone’s rough play, staring at it for what seemed a long time, and then she did what the social worker called an act of juvenile destruction. We, of course, Mrs. Pickett’s wards and children, understood exactly what she was doing when she began pulling apart the little doll.

  Quickly, deliberately, she yanked off its tiny arms and legs, even the head with the long silky hair, and gave each one of us five children a plastic body part, something of our own to have, something of her kindly sister.

  After we were all moved to other houses, passed off to other families, I never again thought about death or even my life at Mrs. Pickett’s. I never considered Miss Lucy and what she did on the day after her sister was put in the ground. Just sometimes when I took out that tiny pink doll arm and remembered how cold Mrs. Pickett felt when I touched her at the casket did I have long clear thoughts about dying.

  Only a few times while I was growing up, alone and unattended, did I consider that once we are gone, we become like Miss Lucy’s doll, pieces of our life torn and strewn about in the various places we have lived, in the pockets of those who knew us.

  All of the days, I thought, that we are alive and breathing, we hold ourselves together in desperation. We keep our hands to ourselves, our fingers not too far-reaching, our hearts stilled behind chest walls. We dare not let our dreams fling us too distantly. We see only what lies in a restricted line of vision. But once we are dead, we are like a doll broken and dispersed to foster children; we are separated, divided, and will never be brought back together again. We are an unsolved puzzle with the pieces scattered and lost.

  My life has been spent preventing all the parts of myself from exploding into fragments, keeping myself together, a lifetime of emotional management. But death was the permission to come undone, the slender plastic arm of a doll that I have kept with me like a charm.