The Next Queen of Heaven Read online

  Sister Alice permitted herself a wry hiss of air through nostrils. “Well, if you’re not resigning or asking for a raise, maybe I can handle it. I can try. What’s up?”

  “The choir meets in the rectory every Thursday evening from seven to nine. We use the meeting room next to the office. We have to be out by nine because Father Mike goes to bed early these days—he’s saying the seven a.m. daily mass over in Cleary Corners ever since Father Giuseppe died.”

  “You need more time to practice? I shouldn’t sound so surprised, of course—”

  “It’s not that. You and I both know that extra rehearsal isn’t going to make much difference. The thing is, I’m working with another group, and I wanted to see if there was a night this other group could meet in the rectory for rehearsal. We’re flexible and could manage whatever night is good—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I know the Legion of Mary and the Holy Names Society alternate their meetings every other Friday night, so that’s out.”

  “What’s the group?”

  “Some guys. Not a church group. Only three of us. We’re rehearsing for a sort of show just after New Year’s in New York. We need a piano.”

  “What sort of show?”

  “It’s an AIDS benefit.” Jeremy’s jaw worked back and forth; a tooth-grinder, noted Sister Alice. She bet he wore a retainer at night.

  “You want to use Our Lady’s rectory to practice for an AIDS charity?”

  “One night a week? None of us have a piano. The church isn’t heated during the week, and we need a warm place. So I thought, you know, the rectory.”

  “I see.” Sister Alice put her file folders on Father Mike’s desk with an airy flop. “This isn’t a liturgical group, I take it?”

  “Not exactly.” Jeremy seemed to be reviewing the group’s members in his mind. “In fact, not at all. I’m the only one who goes to church, and I get paid for it.”

  “Not very much,” said Sister Alice. “Enough,” she added, protective of the parish budget.

  “I don’t know what Father Mike would think. I was kind of hoping to talk to him about it.”

  “Can I take it that some of the members of your group have friends or relatives who are suffering with AIDS?”

  Jeremy’s hands played a scale on the arms of his chair. “Take it that way.”

  The late October light intensified as the wind moved the trees outside the study. It poured in more yellowly—special effects courtesy of the beeches, which were losing their leaves late this year.

  “And your intention would be charity, I suppose,” said Sister Alice.

  “I don’t want to misrepresent myself. There’s a complexity of reasons.” He didn’t look at her.

  Sister Alice saw that she was now on terrain over which she was not licensed to navigate. “Why don’t you approach Father Mike with this yourself, once he’s settled that Leontina Scales. He’s a man of the world, Jeremy; there’s no reason to be shy around him.”

  “Can you tell me whether or not you’ll recommend it?” he said, as Sister Alice began to collect her files again and cram them into her briefcase.

  “You credit me with influence. Thank you for the frisson. But really, I’m not authorized to recommend for or against a scheduling matter.” Sister Alice avoided the question while implying that scheduling matters were far beneath her. “Still, I’ll pass your concerns along. I’m sure Father Mike will want to have a heart-to-heart with you. And if that’s that?” She stood up so fast the chair came an inch off the floor with her.

  They left the rectory together. Jeremy was silent. He didn’t think he’d done very well. Though he liked Sister Alice Coyne, he wished he’d just waited until Father Mike was available. But Our Lady’s was a zoo this morning, and Jeremy wanted to get back to the boys with an answer as soon as possible. It seemed important—every minute was important.

  Ahead, Sister Alice paused on the rectory sidewalk and Jeremy nearly bumped into her. An orderly was fussing at the open doors of an ambulance. They were getting that woman out of harm’s way. She was half sitting up on the stretcher, waving her arms about, barking orders, and her kids looked fussed and flustered.

  The parking lot was partially cleared of cars by now, so the ambulance could maneuver, but Sister Alice wanted to beat it to the driveway. She dug for her keys in the colorful peasant rucksack she carried, a souvenir of that summer holiday spent in Managua with Witness for Peace. “You celebrating Halloween night with your buddies?” she asked Jeremy.

  He shrugged. “Not going out on the town. I’m not one for disguises. They give me the creeps.”

  “Well, look the other way, then. I’m about to become Sister Mary Leadfoot, scourge of the New York State Thruway.” She jammed dark glasses on and jumped in her car.

  That didn’t go too poorly, thought Jeremy. Inconclusive, but nothing ruled out.

  As he turned back to the church, to straighten up the sheet music and lock up the AV system, he pictured the night ahead. Halloween was for kids. He hated grown-ups in masks and always had.

  He imagined himself tonight, upstairs in his flat, a back room on a dead-end street blunted by a hill beginning three lots on. Maybe with the guys, maybe not. Avoiding the monstrous crowds. Halloween seemed like Epiphany, the apostles all closeted away from the callous crowds and from the fear of the risen Jesus, too, about whom they’d been starting to hear. And He appeared to them in their midst. Through a locked door. Talk about your Stephen King scenario: they must have been scared witless. And then they devoted their lives to the church and died as martyrs, every last one of them as far as he knew. A haunting of sorts.

  5

  IF DYING WAS moving through a dark tunnel to the light, what happened if you got stuck? What did that do to you? How about to the people in the tunnel behind you who were trying to die? How come the study circles had never talked about this?

  Leontina Scales couldn’t quite identify the smeared landscape beyond the windows, nor could she pull into focus the face hovering above her. She suspected it to be that vengeful Virgin Mary, thundering down. “Point oh two five cc’s,” said the voice. “Relax your fists, Mrs. Scales. I only want to do this once.”

  Haven’t you already done enough, thought Mrs. Scales. And what about that thing under the stairs, which you were in cahoots with and no denying? Like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night: the Virgin stops the traffic and then who-the-hell-knows-who jumps out. Surprise. It sure wasn’t Clark Gable. Though didn’t Clark Gable have a kind of Satanic perkiness to his eyebrows, come to think of it? Could it have been Salman Rushdie? Or did she have this straight?

  Then a nip, a sting in her arm somewhere. A stitch, a spindle’s prick. She struggled and cried out, and hit out; even endless vigilance wasn’t enough.

  “Is she normally agitated like this?” asked Our Lady.

  “Is she normal, better question,” said a voice that sounded like Tabitha.

  “All will be well,” said Our Lady, taking Leontina’s pulse with a manner more practiced than motherly. Though perhaps that amounted to the same thing. “Jesus, she’s strong. She’s a pisser, she is.” She looked over the horizon. “Takes all kinds to make a world.”

  Tabitha’s voice said, “I don’t suppose she’s like, you know, dying or anything.”

  “Tabby!” Kirk poked her, hard.

  “She’s out,” said the orderly, and sat back on a jump-seat. “Look, kids, I’m going to have to write up a report. Can you tell me if your mom has been acting strange in the past twenty-four hours or so?”

  Tabitha felt Kirk glance at her. She wired her advice: Pin this on me and just wait to see what I’ll do to you.

  “Mom has an active emotional life,” ventured Kirk.

  “Any sign of increased stress? Or, um, mental breakdown?”

  “She’s raising three teenagers on her own. Does that count?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “She always says we aggravate the hell out of her.”

  Tabitha winced. Oh
God, Kirk taking it on himself. Here it comes, watch for it, people: the sniffle. The world’s only living fifteen-year-old crybaby.

  Damn. Tabitha wasn’t going to let Mom do in an afternoon coma what she hadn’t managed to do in her morning screech-a-thon: ruffle out of Tabitha that rich sense of well-being conferred upon her by sex with Caleb Briggs. The deeper Mom wanted to wipe it away, the more Tabitha would cling to that sense of invading glee. Caleb was tawny and twenty. He was a bolt in the belt region, tender as kittens in his nipples—who knew about that before last night? Just touching them had been like electroshock therapy and his voice had gone falsetto in a keen—and his thighs could bring down oak trees, or stampeding cattle, or her. Just seeing what she could do to him with a halt, a pulse, persistence, and a little dab of Crisco. I’ve become a living catalog of turn-ons.

  “Who is the next of kin adult?”

  “I’m almost eighteen,” said Tabitha. “Keep her a week or two and I’m your gal.”

  “Yes, but next to you, I mean.”

  “There’s three former husbands,” said Kirk.

  Tabitha yawned. “The was-bands, we call ’em. As in, you know. I saw your husband last night out with a blonde. Oh, you’re so wrong: Phil isn’t my husband any more, he’s my was-band.”

  “None of them live nearby, anyway.” Kirk leaned forward and put his male-model cuticles on display, softly touching their mother’s wrist. “And Mom was an only child.”

  “Well, hmm. Her parents, then?”

  Tabitha snorted. “Escaped through death.”

  The woman seemed either mollified or beaten, but had the gumption to add, “Don’t worry about your mom following their example. She’s going to be just fine.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Mrs. Scales was rolled into the depths, and the double doors whooshed closed behind the stretcher. “It’ll be at least an hour,” said the intake nurse, apparently to her computer monitor. “But we gotta figure out this next of kin thing.”

  “How about Pastor Jakob?” Kirk said to Tabitha.

  “How about Caleb Briggs?” said Tabitha. “He’s twenty.”

  “Caleb? Mom’s never even met him.”

  “She’s out, what does she care?”

  “We’ll do your pastor, that sounds fine enough,” said Nurse Typo, pecking away. “How do you spell Huyck?”

  “He’s her pastor, not ours,” said Kirk. “Tabitha doesn’t go and I only go sometimes. I haven’t been Centered.”

  The nurse looked over the tops of her glasses at them, finally.

  “That’s like being caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, except the crosshairs are the crucifix.”

  “Are they now. How does h-i-k-e sound to you?”

  “Close enough.”

  “We’ll call it a wrap then. Café on the ground floor by the rear elevators. Someone will come find you in the waiting room in about an hour.”

  Kirk went to the men’s room, probably to have a pretty little cry and admire himself in the mirror, and Tabitha headed for the cafeteria, but the gift shop appeared first, so she nipped inside to see if she could snag a pack of gum or something. She sidled around the shelving and just in time caught sight of Solange Lefebvre and Hannah Brewster from Math Reinforcement. Solange was an import from Paris, France, where they did math the French way, which is why she needed remedial, and Hannah’s family was so old and highbrow that they hadn’t had to produce a working brain cell in generations. Both girls sucked big time.

  Their heads were snared in lunchroom lady hairnets. Their candy-striper aprons didn’t close in the back and they must have made sure to wear their tightest fitting jeans so old men left in wheelchairs could sharpen their noses between blue-denimed cheeks.

  “It is such a bore, it sweeps me with ennui,” said Solange. Only it sounded like Eet ees sush a bore, eet sweeps me with ennui.

  “Je suis pretty fatigué myself,” said Hannah. “I hope we don’t get Pediatrics. Last time one of those little cancer kids almost broke my arm trying to make me drag him out of there. I nearly had to kick him.”

  “I prefer ze department of ze elderly madames. It is more easier there, because they never want to converse with any young and lovely girl.”

  You can’t be talking about yourself, thought Tabitha. You could freeze-dry a croissant just by looking at it.

  They wandered up the aisle. Tabitha didn’t want to run into them, but they did provide a distraction of sorts. So she found herself following them one aisle over. She could always snub them in person if they turned a corner and caught her.

  When she was within earshot again, she got an earful. “I do think Mr. Finn will give you a passing grade,” Solange was saying. “He knows you will need ze maths in order to select a decent college. And he likes you. I see that he likes you.”

  “You’re dreadful.” Hannah was blushing. As if Hannah could even imagine what having someone like you could do to you, turning your spine to jelly, making of your vagina a sixth sense. She’d probably never kissed a boy. You could kind of tell.

  “Anyway,” continued Hannah, “Mom’s family wanted me to go to Radcliffe only it’s part of Harvard now, so we don’t know about that.”

  Harvard? Fat chance. You get lost doing laps in the county pool, Hannah.

  “I believe every scholar in Mr. Finn’s class will achieve many diplomas and proceed toward university,” said Solange. “Except for only one.”

  Here it comes, thought Tabitha.

  Hannah grimaced. “Tabby’s special.”

  “Special?” Solange didn’t know the lingo.

  “Special. Special needs, to start with. She’ll be lucky if she graduates. And special because she sure acts like she thinks she’s a hot ticket. Anyway I doubt she’s doing college prep. She’ll be married and pregnant before next year.”

  “Well, she can keep her special eyes off my little brioche.”

  “She’s probably already taken a big bite out of your little brioche. Better check the goods before you buy.” They laughed wickedly.

  I hate them, thought Tabitha. What’s a brioche?

  “You’re joking, though,” said Solange. “Is she that bad?”

  “She’s so good, is the locker-room news, she’s extra bad. She’s done the whole football team in alphabetical order.”

  “She knows her alphabet that well?”

  “Well, le ordaire alphabétique isn’t the important part. She knows something.” Hannah sounded a little wistful.

  You bet the fuck I know something, thought Tabitha.

  “I can’t find it. We’re going to be late. You got what you came for?”

  “For my yeast infection, yes,” said Solange. “Had we better depart?”

  They left. Tabitha liberated a PowerBar on the way out. Lord, give me strength, she thought. On the silence of her rubber-soled Reeboks she followed her classmates twenty paces behind. They passed through a door propped open with a chair and Tabitha heard a sound of metal locker doors banging, and she saw her classmates continue through an interior door to some further station. Probably to get their assignments.

  She hoped it wasn’t the E.R.

  None of the lockers had locks on them. By the third try Tabitha had found Solange’s waxy white pharmaceutical bag and Hannah’s funky little pink purse advertising Cancun! in rhinestones. So Tabitha went back to cruise the aisles of the shop until she found what she needed. Then at the locker room she replaced Solange Lefebvre’s treatment for yeast fever with a cure for constipation. She hoped Solange’s English wasn’t so good that she’d strain to read the small print on ze package.

  As for Hannah, Tabitha removed the thumbtack holding up a sign reminding volunteers to wash their hands whenever they got crap and stuff on them. With care she punctured the little flattish foil packet all the way through a half dozen times, at an angle so the little slits might not be visible in dim light. How providential, a gift from God: the condom that Tabitha hadn’t had time to insi
st Caleb wear. Across the edge she scrawled, U Go To Hell and she drew a big heart around the words. She thought of writing “from a special friend” with the hopes that Hannah would give out to some unsuspecting boy, but she wasn’t sure how to spell special. She slipped it into Hannah’s purse and replaced the health advisory with the thumbtack.

  On the way back to find Kirk and see what the doctors were going to say, Tabitha Scales passed through a corridor where light came in through the UV-glazed windows, picking out with punishing clarity the bad art that someone had forced the hospital to hang on display. Angels and little stupid flowers and, for some reason, a fire hydrant. The constant pinging of the hospital PA system paused for once, allowing airtime for a half-dozen measures of some weary song that had been played too often all year long. What was it? Oh, right. “Believe,” by Cher.

  Tabitha experienced a certain lift. Mom was comatose and Caleb was waiting offstage. For the last day of October, the sun was curiously strong. She thought that she might be blushing, though maybe that was the aftereffect of the idea of blowing the football team in alphabetical order. (As if. Not even close.)

  She had all of her life ahead of her. She felt almost special.

  6

  A LATE OCTOBER sun can seem like a trawler seen from an undersea slope. The way it hovers in that cellophane blue, the way it drags shadows across the terrain like dark nets. This year the trees had husbanded their leaves with a kind of greediness, but their grip was slackening. Morse Hill Road felt like a sluice through brown rapids.

  Jeremy pulled into the lot at Bozo Joe’s, more colloquially called Unfriendly’s after the fast-food franchise that, like so many other chains, had abandoned Thebes and unloaded the decommissioned building at a loss. Fixtures too: the mock Colonial-style booths upholstered in Wedgwood-blue vinyl, the ice cream flavors painted on the slats of a display panel shaped like a window shutter. But the unplugged freezers by the take-out windows now housed brown paper napkins. The menu featured your basic burgers and grease. Bozo Joe wasn’t in the business of fulfilling anyone’s culinary dreams. This was Thebes, New York, after all.