The Accidentals Read online

  Hil nodded, weighing what I’d said. “Sure,” she said coolly, linking my arm into hers. “Hope Grace likes it over there.”

  I ESPECIALLY MISSED my sister when I was cooking supper. In the afternoons after our mother died, we’d danced around to the radio in the kitchen, me in Mama’s daisy apron, Grace with a cup towel tied around her waist. We’d prepared food side by side, singing at the top of our lungs to the Top 40. Creamy Welsh rarebit and stewed chicken in brown gravy and devil’s food cake with angel icing had had their way with our father, bringing him back to his senses after we lost our mother. Eventually he’d given up on the bomb shelter, shoveling the dirt back into the cavernous hole he’d dug in our yard, then planted seeds in the loose dirt for an early vegetable garden. He’d sat companionably at the kitchen table reading the paper as Grace and I wrangled skillets and Pyrex pans like we were running a greasy spoon. His inattentive but benign presence gave us a sense of domesticity, a feeling of home.

  After my sister left, there was no fun to any of it. In the late afternoon the winter sun cut across the linoleum in the kitchen in one long thin line. At night I sat across the table from Dad, who’d returned to being a ghost.

  “Dad,” I asked, “what’s going to happen to Grace and her little child?” I pictured her bringing it home in a pretty blanket, its little face a tiny replica of my sister’s. I had the perfect plan. We’d kill off Frances with phlebitis and say it was her baby, now orphaned and in need of our care. I’d push it around in a stroller, mash it bananas and green beans, give it long baths, first measuring the water temperature with my elbow.

  “Frances is going to take it. Grace will come back home and go back to school,” he said, not looking up from his paper.

  “But Grace will miss it.” What I meant was I’d miss it. It would be fun to have a baby around. I could quit school and take care of it.

  “No, she won’t,” Dad said.

  WITH MY SISTER gone, I threw on Mama’s now-threadbare apron and made supper as fast as humanly possible, slamming pots and pans around, sighing like an overworked housewife. As my enthusiasm for cooking went down the drain, something else was percolating, something that ebbed and flowed invisibly and whispered wanting and warning in equal parts, stirring me up to boiling and then telling me I’d get burned.

  Over the supper table Dad and I would steal looks at each other as though we were strangers eating at side-by-side tables in a restaurant. Then, one night, he looked at me straight on and said, “You know, you look more like your mother every day.”

  I’d just shoved a hunk of meatloaf into my mouth, so I didn’t say anything back, just kept chewing, but how he said it and his strangely famished look made me feel like I was swallowing a rock.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” he muttered. He pushed his chair back and got up from the table and headed for the TV.

  The next afternoon he came in with two TV trays, which he set up in the living room, one in front of the sofa, one in front of a chair on the other side of the room.

  “Thought it’d be nice to watch TV while we eat,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “You pick.”

  After that we watched television during supper. Then Dad would clear the trays while I washed the dishes and wiped down the countertops. He would turn off the TV and bury his nose in one of his crossword puzzles. If I turned the TV back on, he’d peer at me over his reading glasses and ask, “Have you done your homework? Do you need to study for any tests?” I always said yes, I’d done my homework, and no, I didn’t need to study, which was no more of a lie than anything else.

  MEANWHILE, WHATEVER IT was that was roiling around inside me was getting more disagreeable by the day. It said, Watch out, be careful, at the same time it said, Go ahead, raise some hell, sister. Sometimes I pictured it as a bad baby, Grace’s baby, kicking and squalling and wanting to get out and boss me around. It came and it went, I noticed with growing alarm, with the full moon, making me worry I might be a vampire. Some nights, it made me toss and turn in bed, touching me with its tiny fingers, almost tickling me but not quite, making things worse, then better, then worse again. I felt tricked, then trapped by a teasing hand.

  One Saturday night Hil and I were walking home from the picture show. We’d just seen Shane, which was coming back for its third rerun at the Lyric, and I was as usual dreamy-eyed over Alan Ladd. His sky-blue eyes, that lock of hair that fell down over his forehead. It was fall but warm and musky sweet with the smell of fallen leaves. Hil and I passed Alden Park in the center of town. I pictured Alan and me sitting together on the bench under the Temperance Lady statue next to the drooping sycamore, his arm around me, holding me close.

  I slowed down. “Do you want to sit down a while?” I walked over to the bench and sat.

  Hil came over and sat down too. She sighed. “I love Shane.”

  “Me too.”

  I slid over. “Let’s do some practice kissing.” This was something Hil and I did rather frequently in private. We were practicing for boys, we told each other, each picturing long lines of boys awaiting our favors. Hil was being raised by her mother in an apartment the size of our kitchen and living room. Her mother was a secretary at the mill where Dad worked, and some afternoons after school I’d stop by and we’d pull Hil’s Murphy bed down from the living room wall and kiss for a while. In truth, Hil didn’t need practice; her kisses were deep and wet as a spring rain and they jolted me all the way down to my toes. Nothing I’ve felt since has matched them for effect.

  After a bit of kissing we would take off our shirts and New Life youth bras so we could also practice rubbing our scrappy little breasts on each other’s chest, which we thought would be pleasurable for the boys since it most certainly was for us. Kissing Plus, we called it. It was something we did, like sharing a pack of Nabs or doing our geometry homework on the rickety kitchen table. After we finished Kissing Plus, we would stagger upright and push the bed back up into the wall and put our tops back on and rearrange our pants or skirts, which had inevitably come down or risen up.

  On the park bench Hil moved away from me.

  Hil never said no to kissing, so her answer took me aback. Boys and girls stopped in the park all the time to kiss on the way home from the picture show. The bad baby in me wanted to grab her face and kiss her hard, make her full lips turn purple with bruising, call out to the world that we were practicing our kissing and getting damn good at it in case any boys were interested, but Hil pulled even farther away. I felt myself flush hot, then cold, a bit like when Mama used to rub my chest with Ben-Gay when I was little and had a cold.

  “I think I’ve practiced enough,” she said. “I think I’ve got it now. I think I’m ready for boys.”

  I got up from the bench, not looking at her. “Let’s go then.”

  She rose without a word. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I think you are too.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, a Sunday, she called and asked if I wanted to go to Calvary Baptist with her and her mother that night. There was a special preacher coming over from Hattiesburg, and tonight’s service was going to kick off a week-long revival.

  Since Mama had been taken away in that ambulance, I’d vowed never to commune with God because when I did, I worked myself into such a fury at Him for letting my mother die I felt I was going to explode like the Hindenburg blimp. Plus, there was Grace’s little child for Him to account for. Last but not least, I was mad at God because Grace was mad at me and, if there were any justice in this world He allegedly created, she shouldn’t have been. I also had a secondary list ten miles long of what I was mad at God for: war, famine, the Bomb, tornadoes, starving orphan babies, Sputnik dogs dead and alive.

  But I jumped at the invitation, said sure, I’d like to go to the revival, sure, I could be ready at six, anything to get out of the house. To this day I don’t know what caused me to take up with Jesus, but from the moment I walked up the aisle of the Calvary Baptist Church flanked by Hil and Mrs. Lumpkin, whose tired face fli
ckered like a candle, I felt something strange happen. The preacher was the Reverend Harold P. Chisholm, and though I’d like to say he drew me into the fold with his sermon, I don’t remember much of what he said except that the church was the bride of Christ, and that all who were part of the church were brides of Christ.

  This idea about being the bride of Jesus hit me like a ton of bricks. Of course! That was what I wanted, what I yearned for, to be somebody’s bride! To wear a drop-dead gorgeous white dress and carry a bouquet and walk down the aisle (unlike my sinful sister). To have somebody to keep company with, have a decent conversation with, share my innermost thoughts and feelings. This was why I tossed and turned at night, this was what I’d been missing.

  So when Harold P. Chisholm said to come on down and take up with Jesus, I literally floated down the aisle, my shoulders thrown back, graceful as a deer making her way through the deep woods, serene as snow. I vowed to be Jesus’s bride, to have and to hold from that day forward and even forever more. I’d been put in a jet rocket by the Holy Ghost and shot up into a beautiful starry sky, full of the spirit, heading straight for my rendezvous with the Prince of Peace.

  The music was pretty, something about coming to the Garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, how He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own. When the call came, I scrambled like a mountain goat over Hil, who’d nodded off in the pew, to be the first to get down the aisle to the Reverend Harold P. Chisholm and Jesus. Soon there was a flock of us floating down the aisle to the Garden. I would have preferred it had been just me marrying Jesus, but nothing’s perfect.

  I did get there first, at which point the Reverend asked my name and then whispered to me, “June, receive Grace,” which almost spoiled the whole thing.

  When everybody got to the front, all of us girls, we dedicated our lives to Him, and then a big curtain in the back of the choir rolled back and there was a swimming pool of water and Harold P. Chisholm shepherded all of us who hadn’t received the sacrament of the one true baptism up to it and we walked down into the clear water in our Sunday clothes and he dunked us under and the water was cold as the ice in my sister’s eyes.

  Grace, I said as I went under, you don’t forgive me, but Jesus does.

  Then I came up, coughing and sputtering, cleansed of my mother’s blood and Grace’s little child. And my own bad baby, the snake that had roiled within me, it was washed away, forever and eternity, amen.

  16

  Holly

  WHEN I LOOKED UP FROM MY CROSSWORD PUZZLE AND saw June coming through the door looking like a drowned rat, I thought that Lumpkin woman had run her car into Ponce Creek on the way home from church. I thought my girl was hurt, maybe in shock, the way she was staring and shivering and looking just plain odd. It was the way my buddy Charlie looked that day outside Aubel when he lost half his head. That bug-eyed stare of his, out of the one eye, it scared the life out of me, it was worse than the blood. When I looked into that one eye, my gut heaved and cramped like I’d been kicked in the belly, and that’s what it started doing now when June came through the door.

  I jumped up from my chair, the puzzle slipping from my lap onto the floor. I said, “What the hell happened to you?”

  She just kept on giving me a wall-eyed stare through her wet, matted hair and headed for the bathroom, leaving a trail of water down the hall.

  I tailed her. “Wait a minute. What happened? Tell me what happened.”

  She didn’t stop or turn around, just went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  I hit the door with the flat of my hand. “Answer me, June. Why are you soaking wet? What happened? Were you in a wreck? Are you hurt?”

  I could hear her fumbling around in there. I turned the doorknob but it was locked. And now this, I thought. I kicked the door and hollered to her, “Get out here, June. Get out and tell me what happened. Right now.”

  A dead silence. Then the door opened. She still had on the wet clothes. Her hair was put up in a towel and she was barefoot, her shoes and socks in her hand. The wet clothes clung to her. She looked like Olivia used to when she stepped out of the bath, fresh and pink. For a second, just a second, I stared at her the way a man stares at a woman. For that second, I forgot this woman, and yes, clearly she was a woman now, was my daughter. It all happened in a flash. My eyes said look and I did.

  Then I found myself and backed up fast, slamming into the wall.

  She gazed at me, looking absent-minded now, like I was a dish she’d forgotten to put up after supper. Then she smiled a little smile and said she’d been baptized in the spirit. She was saved from her sins. Now she was the bride of Jesus. Wasn’t I happy for her?

  My mouth dropped open, and, in that one terrible moment, I saw how empty our lives had been since Grace went away, how empty and how full of something I couldn’t say. How we’d been trembling on a ledge.

  “No,” I said. “I am not happy for you. This bridge of Christ thing is ridiculous.”

  She smiled like I was the fool of the world. “It’s bride of Christ, Dad.”

  “Bride or bridge, it’s crazy. What next? Are you going to come in here tomorrow and tell me you want to become a nun?”

  Not that I didn’t believe in church. I’d been brought up in one, a little Episcopalian chapel made of stone, with a steeple and a mournful bell, the same church I’d sent our daughters to. Olivia wouldn’t set foot in the door, but our girls needed to learn how to behave in the world, how to be decent people. I’d gotten them dressed and taken them to Sunday school. Sometimes I put on a coat and tie and took them to church too. We had a deal. If they went without squawking, I’d take them to see the giraffes. But since Olivia died, I’d had no truck with religion, most especially not with the kind that involved getting thrown into a tub of water or walking into a river with your clothes on. The body and the blood, it seemed ridiculous, and given what I’d seen, totally—what’s the word for something that’s too much, that’s beside the point? Redundant. Where was God Almighty when Olivia was bleeding to death in our own bed? What about her blood? It had soaked all the way through the mattress to the box springs. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, what a mess she’d left me.

  June pushed past me. “I’m tired, Dad, let me go to sleep.” Then she padded down the hall, her dress still dripping, and went into her room and shut the door.

  I looked down at her footprints on the wood floor. I noticed for the first time that my daughter’s feet were small. They looked like they belonged to a child, someone much younger. They stopped at her door at the hall’s end like she’d sprouted wings, vanished into thin air, taken off into the wide blue yonder to go live on the moon. I’d never felt so alone on this earth, not even when Olivia died.

  The next morning June came into the kitchen humming “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” which set my teeth on edge. A fountain filled with blood. Just what we needed in this damn house. The blood had seeped into the floorboards by our bed, I couldn’t get it out. Thanks to my daughter I hadn’t slept worth a damn, and when I did fade off, I kept dreaming about the war, people getting blown up in deep banks of snow, splatters of blood everywhere. In the dream I looked down and saw various parts of me gone, not just my toes, which I’d already lost, but a leg here, a hand there. Finally all I had left was my own dripping head. I held it in my hands and stared down into my own dead unseeing eyes.

  I put down my morning paper. It was the only pleasure of my daytime hours, and it irritated me no end to have to interrupt my reading. June stood behind the kitchen counter drinking some orange juice from the carton. Since Grace had gone, she’d taken to doing that. Grace used to fuss at her for drinking from the carton, said she was getting spit in the orange juice.

  “Tell me what happened last night.” I tried to keep my voice level, though the look on her face made me want to slap her. It shocked me the way I wanted to hurt her in that moment.

  She turned her back to me, not answering. I sat there, st
unned, furious, staring at her back. It was straight as a board, like she was standing up against an invisible wall. What had gotten into her?

  When she turned around, she was smiling, more like a smirk. “It’s okay, Dad, I was just baptized and rededicated my life to Jesus.”

  “You never dedicated your life to Jesus in the first place. Plus, you’re already baptized. You were baptized as a baby.”

  She kept on smirking at me. Boy oh boy, did I want to slap that smirk right off her face.

  “But that wasn’t an immersion, Dad. It wasn’t a true baptism.” She spoke to me like I was the willful, ignorant child and she was the parent.

  I couldn’t have cared less about who got sprinkled and who got immersed, but I truly detest people who rub religion in your face. I said the nastiest thing I could think of. “Your mother is rolling over in her grave.”

  “At least I’m going to heaven,” she said.

  I went for her before I could stop myself. The kitchen counter was between us and she jumped back so my hand couldn’t reach her. I wanted to kill her, wipe that smugness off her face forever. Until that moment, I’d never understood why people hurt their children. It felt like I’d been initiated into a secret club I didn’t want to join.

  “Get out of this house,” I roared. “Get out and stay out.” I wanted to beat her to a bloody pulp, smash her face into the wall.

  She didn’t say a word, just gathered her schoolbooks, which were in a neat stack on the counter, took the last gulp of her juice, and walked out the door. She set off on her bike, though the weather was cold and blustery and threatened rain.

  When she shut the door with a self-righteous little click, I turned and slammed my fist into the wall, which hurt like hell and didn’t make a dent since the wall was plaster. Then I paced the floor, holding my hurt hand in the other one. I paced up and down. I tried to look at things objectively. I was an accountant, and there were numbers. I calculated three gone, two on the way out the door. The way I’d come to think about it, June carried not just her own self but my boy too, the one I’d carried in my belly all through the war, she carried him or the possibility of him into the future.