The Arms of God: A Novel Read online

  I stayed with Olivia twenty minutes, maybe a little less, remembering that doll and Mrs. Pickett, and thinking about all the different ways a person can grieve. I thought about Miss Lucy, the preacher and a nurse trying to pull her out of that corner. I thought of Mary Stella running out of the church, screaming and refusing to be held. I remembered the other adopted child, Billy Mac, and how he threw rocks at his mother’s bedroom window, leaving a crack that silently splintered into long, narrow lines.

  I thought about the three foster children, how we all sat up straight in the hardback chairs, behaving ourselves, quiet, waiting to be told when to pack and where we’d be going next. Our grief was hard and cold, a stone hidden in our hearts. We had already faced our greatest losses and the only things we grieved any more were the little luxuries in which we had come to find pleasure. Mrs. Pickett’s homemade cinnamon rolls, hot and buttery, the icing a glaze of sweetness. Soft terry-cloth towels or our own beds. New school supplies, a plastic lunch box. After a couple of years in the foster home program, a child carries few expectations, only memories of the one or two surprisingly delightful things we enjoyed in the other houses.

  I straightened the gown Olivia was wearing and smoothed out the sheet across her chest, placing her arms down by her sides. I combed her hair and wiped her face with a cloth I found on the counter by the gurney. I even picked up the paper and trash from the floor around her bed and put it in the can near the door. I did everything I could think to do in the time I had alone with Olivia Jacobs except tell her good-bye. Since, in her leaving, she had never said a word of farewell to me, I realized in her death that I did not know how to say it to her. And since my grief was still locked in a box behind my heart, I did not know how or what I should feel.

  I left the room and found Heather sitting at the nurses’ station writing up a report. She seemed surprised when I approached her and she quickly glanced at the clock that hung on the wall just behind me. She smiled and came around the tall desk and handed me Olivia’s belongings. They had been placed inside a white plastic hospital bag that was sitting just on the corner of the desk.

  Inside the bag, she showed me, were Olivia’s clothes and shoes, her watch, a tiny amethyst ring that she wore on her wedding finger, her glasses, and her purse with keys to a home I had never seen. The small piece of paper folded twice with my name and number had been carefully written and slipped in the zippered pocket on the outside of the purse. This note, Heather explained, was how they knew where to find me. The word “daughter,” written under my number, was how they knew who I was.

  I gave her the name of a local funeral home, chosen randomly from the yellow pages, said I couldn’t yet think of a preacher, and I pulled the string at the top of the plastic bag and slung it across my shoulder.

  Heather walked with me to the front desk of the emergency department and seemed disappointed that she hadn’t been able to help me more with my grief. I smiled at her and held up a hand as the large glass doors opened and I moved near them. She waved back and I imagined that she would go home that night and tell her boyfriend or husband that a daughter came to see her dead mother that morning during her shift and hadn’t even shed a tear.

  She would tell it slowly and with a lot of sadness and discontent, troubled at how families no longer care for one another. Then later, after she had rinsed and placed the dishes in her new stainless-steel dishwasher, wrapped up the leftovers for her lunch the next day, and wiped the table clean, she would call her mother just to say hello, delighting her parents with her attentiveness and reminding them of how lucky they were to have such a dutiful daughter.

  I got into my car and shut the door, yanking the seat belt around me. I waited while a truck pulled in beside me. A woman, the driver, got out, ran to the passenger’s side, and opened the door. A man seated, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, stood outside, and closed the door. He looked at me through my window, just for a second, and dipped his head, a polite greeting as the blood trickled down the side of his face, dripping beneath his right eyebrow, then turned to walk on to the emergency room. The woman, chasing him, waved her hands in the air, yelling at him to wait.

  I stuck the keys in the ignition and then reached into the plastic bag that was sitting on my lap and took out Olivia’s old black purse. I slid my fingers along the stiff leather handles. I fingered the zipper, pulling it back and forth, opening and closing it. I held it to my face and smelled it. Then I put it and the plastic bag on the passenger seat beside me, took out the set of keys from the inside compartment, and stuck them in my front pocket. I started the engine, and without really thinking about the decision I was making, began driving in a direction I had not planned, following the whim of a little girl I barely knew.

  As I drove out of the parking lot I remembered one of Olivia’s recent visits. It was about the sixth or seventh time she had come to our house, late in the evening, just around supper-time. It was like the other earlier visits. She called first, her voice quiet and yearning. She’d ask if it was appropriate if she joined us and I would answer yes. I would tell her what we were eating for supper and she would explain that she could wait until after we ate. I would remind her that there was always enough to share and she would mumble a word of thanks and be at my front door in less than thirty minutes.

  She never ate much, “like a bird,” I’d say to her; and she would nod and reply that she always got what she needed. She never talked much, just answered our questions, cautiously and thoughtful, like she knew what we were going to ask. Mostly, she just listened, fidgeted a lot and listened. To Anna who talked about her day at school, the homework, the struggles with the other girls, the way she longed for summer. Or to me, my complaints about work, the printer that was old and not working, the amount of paperwork in a college business office, the noise involved in the remodeling project in the building next to mine.

  She was respectful, never offered advice or criticism, never stayed longer than a couple of hours, always helped me with the dishes.

  On the visit I was remembering as I pulled away from the hospital, Anna asked her why she wouldn’t let me drive her home. I had offered every time she got ready to leave, but she always politely refused, asking only that I call a number and tell the person who answered that Olivia was ready to go.

  “Don’t you want Mama to take you home?” my daughter asked, her brown eyes so full of innocence.

  “My friend’s a good driver,” Olivia replied and left it at that.

  I had not thought much about her refusals. I just assumed she liked her independence in coming and going or maybe even that she enjoyed spending time with the man who picked her up in his old brown Chevrolet, always waving in my direction before he backed away.

  “Why’s she so secretive about everything?” my daughter asked me one night after the thin dark man who drove Olivia to and from my house pulled out of the driveway. Anna waved good-bye to her grandmother and closed the front door.

  “Maybe she just doesn’t want me to drive her,” I replied. I started drying the dinner dishes. Anna pulled the drapes closed and fell back against the sofa.

  “Or it could be that she and her ‘friend’ got something going on.” I grinned at her, raising my eyebrows as if I were giving juicy gossip, and watched as my daughter rolled her eyes.

  There was a long pause before she spoke. She was watching a game show, the applause loud and ordered.

  “Maybe she’s ashamed of where she lives,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe she thinks that if you saw her house, you’d feel sorry for her and ask her to live with us.”

  I stopped drying and stacking and turned toward my ten-year-old child, amazed at her level of maturity, her perfectly detached insight.

  Of course she was right. Olivia remained private about everything, about her reason for leaving me, the direction her life had taken, the place she called home, because she didn’t want to elicit drama or pity from the daughter she abandoned. She shared nothing of who she was wh
en she walked out of my life and who she was when she walked back in because it was just easier for me not to know.

  If she lived in a spacious home with a guest room and a wide clean yard, then surely she knew I would wonder why she had waited so long to reunite. I would see that there was room for me and Anna to come and go and enjoy her smooth lace linens and thick sprawling gardens and I’d be angry that she hadn’t shown up sooner. And if she lived in a shack, a rented room in a crack house on the edge of town where I had never ventured, I would certainly feel compelled to do something for her, provide her with a more comfortable arrangement.

  I realized as I drove from the hospital heading in the direction of her recorded address that she was wise not to allow for either possibility. And as I moved toward where she lived, I understood she was more concerned about pity than she was about drama. She had not been living in a house of fine linens and full beautiful gardens. She did not have extra room for company. She had not been selfish with her things.

  Long past rows of neatly groomed trees and flower boxes that lined blue and white shutters, I drove. Beyond the sidewalks and playgrounds that marked the good neighborhoods, I drove toward center of town where tall buildings and brows crossed in worry hide the sun. Beyond the pedestrian walkways and the women who hurry by in their uptown clothes and small sneakered feet, I turned down Lee Street and moved into an area of town that was unfamiliar and generally avoided by people who work so near its border.

  I made the same circle twice, down beyond the boarded-up pool hall, out from Jimmy’s Kash and Karry, and down around the back of a long brick building marked with a Community Hall sign, when I realized I was trapped inside a neighborhood that seemed to begin and end at the four-way stop in front of Calvary Hill Fellowship Baptist Church. Searching for the place where Olivia had stayed and only briefly mentioned was proving to be as much of a hardship as any other part of our journey. I was just about to turn around when I came to the street I knew to be the right one and quickly began to follow the house numbers.

  Massey, the street where she lived, was off the hard-surfaced road on my left at the four-way stop, and was a short thoroughfare that dropped and curved until the pavement ended only a few hundred yards away from the intersection. The three hundred block consisted of only six duplexes close to the road on both the left and the right, all with white trim and cars lining the gravel drives. I inched ahead along the narrow passageway, past Margie’s House of Beauty, and lines of clothes that waved and snapped, drying in the sun.

  412 was a two-story old boardinghouse sided up next to a row of little white buildings and jutting out from the lawn like a broken tooth. There hanging from a tall rusted pole was a small green sign with the number 412 etched in gray paint and hardly legible in the shifting wind. Recently planted marigolds circled the pole, adding a splash of yellow to the dusty, brown yard. An old tree, a sugarberry, stood just on the corner, just beyond the edge of the house, its limbs swinging low and the narrow leaves spinning in the breeze.

  I parked on the street, in front of the tree, checking the locks on all four doors of the car. The area was quiet. Few vehicles passed and no one was outside that I could see. As I walked to the house I looked up the road, noticing how close the interstate was. Remembering the curves and the downtown traffic, I tried to determine if there was an easier exit than there had been entry, exercising another old foster home habit of mine.

  This technique I had learned from a girl named Talitha. She was big for her age and stronger than anybody I had ever known. She had been in foster homes all of her life, dropped in a Dumpster at a hospital, just after she was born, and wrapped in a long brown potato sack.

  She had gotten caught alone when she was five and gang-raped by some boys in an orphanage. She was in a coma for six weeks, having been beaten with a baseball bat. When she awoke, not having remembered exactly what had taken place, she was convinced that a bad thing had happened because she had gone down a hall and into a room that had just one door and a tiny window cut above the closet.

  She remembered only that she had seen the small space above the closet opening, the glass pulled and locked, no room for even a little girl to slide through; and she had thought, just before she had blacked out, “This evil would not be happening if only I could fit through that window.”

  “Never go into a place you can’t get out of,” she instructed me when I was ten or eleven and had been punched and cornered by a girl four years older and forty pounds heavier. Talitha had pulled me out and away from her. She walked me into the family den, a room with long, open windows and two wide doors.

  “Make sure there’s another place you can run to, another room, or a window you can crawl through,” she added as she checked my swollen lip to see if it was bleeding and then gently smoothed down my hair.

  “A girl’s gotta watch where she goes.” And she held my quivering chin in her hand and nodded. “You’ll learn,” she said, smiling, “’cause you’re smart.”

  I have never called myself smart. I was only an average student in school, never won an award or got asked to go to college. But Talitha was right about part of what she saw in me. I did learn. I have always been careful about the rooms I would enter and stay.

  I climbed four steps to a long porch that wrapped around the house and was empty except for two wooden rockers that moved with the motion of a slow, lazy thought. I knocked on the splintered screen door, wondering whom I might find inside and feeling the heat of the late morning sun as it slid down my neck. A few minutes passed when I heard the movement coming toward the door and was met by first a shadow and then a woman shaped like a child, not much bigger than Olivia.

  Her hair was combed into rows of white braids that ended in frayed knots, circling her dark head like a crown of pearls. One of her eyes wandered away from the other as her right hand felt for the long, crooked lock on the door, making sure it was fitted into the small ring on the frame. She seemed as uneasy as I that I was standing on her porch.

  “You here about Olivia Jacobs?”

  I nodded.

  The woman was chewing on the inside of her bottom lip, her forehead pressed into the meshed wire that separated us. “She dead, I guess.” The old woman tilted her head, studying me with the one eye that didn’t jerk. “You the daughter?” She asked like she had been waiting for me. “Alice,” she added.

  It surprised me to hear her say my name.

  The late spring flurry was kicking up my dress and I fumbled with it to keep it down, aware of the presence of the empty rocking chairs that dipped and swayed more heavily.

  “Yes,” I answered softly.

  The one eye gazed long before she pushed aside the lock and cracked the door. The wind pulled against the screen and wood; and I quickly stepped inside, the door closing hard behind me.

  The old woman shuffled past a sitting room and turned to the stairwell saying nothing as I followed her, glancing from side to side to notice the pictures hanging on the wall. We walked up the steps, moving slowly toward the top and then again to the front of the house until she stopped at a brown-stained door with a cast-iron B nailed in the center.

  “You got her key?” She was watching me now.

  “Yes, it was in her purse.” I reached inside my pocket and retrieved the small silver ring that bore the two keys, one marked with a red dot and one marked with a blue one, and handed them to the woman. She took the red key and slipped it into the lock, gently turning the knob.

  “My brother’s sold his farm east of town. City’s putting a highway through it.” The old woman handed me back the ring of keys. I could feel her studying me. “He’s moving in here the first of the month.” She slid her bottom lip from side to side. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this.

  “You be out by then?” she asked, suddenly making herself clear.

  I nodded slightly. “I should think so. I’m just here to get her stuff,” I said, trying to focus on the woman’s one good eye without looking curio
us or disrespectful.

  She waited like she had something else to say and then turned without a reply, shuffling in the direction from which we had come, slowly moving down the stairs, leaving me alone in the place where Olivia had made her home.

  It was a narrow room and cool. A single bed was pushed against one wall and a trunk was wedged between the footboard and the doorjamb. It was obvious that the space had been furnished by the house owner since the sparse furniture looked similar to what I saw in the sitting room when I entered and the walls were decorated with pictures not unlike those I passed on my way from the front door. Landscapes mostly, colorful prints of thick forests, cedars and firs, white oaks and silverbells, one of a cabin, deep in a grove of tall pines.

  A large oval rug covered the center of the floor, adding cushion to my steps as I moved inside. A little cove in the middle of the wall to my left suggested a closet but was covered by a thin faded curtain, keeping its purpose a mystery. The room was dark and I searched for a light, finding a lamp on the table next to the door. I switched it on and then moved to the one window, pulling up the shade that hung low beneath the sill.

  The light poured in, lifting dust and giving warmth to the darkness. I turned around to imagine what solace Olivia found here, to see what she saw the last days of her life. The single bed, the curtained cove, the pictures someone else had bought and hung, as sparse as it all seemed, there was still a sense of home. And yet, surely, my daughter was right. Even though the room and the house were fine, clean and safe, big windows and lots of exits, my mother must not have told us where she lived because she was ashamed.

  There was a rocker placed near the window covered in heavy red velvet worn in the places where someone’s haunches and neck, shoulders and back rested. It was turned toward the outside, facing the string of houses that pushed near the border of town leading to the interstate that stretched from east to west. I imagined that it was here that Olivia spent her time, remembering the past or planning some nearby future. It was here, I thought, where she decided to find me and gathered her courage to come to the other side of town.