The Next Queen of Heaven Read online

  “Exactly. So off I go to school.” She added, “You gonna drive me or what?”

  “Where’s Caleb, your Mister Motorcycle Man?”

  Tabitha pursed her lips, tamping her lipstick the way her mother always did. “Mmmm,” she said, a beat too long. “Well, let’s go, Hog.”

  Nice of Hogan not to press the issue, she thought. But where was Caleb Briggs? Had she been so very hot the night before Halloween that she had scared him off? Her mind went back to the time she’d seen his bike in the Ames parking lot—the time her mother had started cussing like a streetwalker who has run out of sidewalk. Tabitha hadn’t caught sight of Caleb in the store that day. And those louts lounging around near the soda cans mounded by the front windows—she’d hurried past them in shame and mortification, without giving them a sideways look. But were they Caleb’s friends? And if so, where was he? Not hiding behind shelving to avoid her, the way she had done to avoid Hannah and Solange?

  It was all too confusing. Here she thought she’d convinced Caleb she was sexually provocative enough to last out a set of marriage vows, give good value for money, no prim virginal dope, and she’d quite possibly scared him off with her vigor and, um, imagination. Maybe that business with the chocolate-covered cherries and the jumper cables had been a bit too knowing.

  She fingered her white collar into a more belligerent pertness. Hogan was wrong about her strategy. She missed Caleb, and he wasn’t answering her phone calls. So she hoped at least to get some sympathy from someone. Some grown-up to crow, “Your mom has gone temporarily brain dead and here you are, just carrying on! You brave dear!” She imagined the words. She had practiced how she might drop her gaze to the floor and twist her hands together, maybe murmur and blush a little if she could manage it. The problem was that she couldn’t imagine who would address her with such concern. Nobody liked her. Hess had thrown her out of the lab last year when her own personal breakage costs had topped two hundred bucks. That cow McTavish hated her guts. Mr. Abbott didn’t know who she was since he was old enough to be senile and she’d only gone to Civilization Survey, like, twice.

  And her so-called classmates. They were stuck living the lie that was high school. The boys all did sports as if they were NFL material. Except the nerds whom nobody bothered with, including themselves. And the girls were like Solange and Hannah. Guarded, that was the word. Guarded, because Tabitha was lusty and liberated and wore her reputation as a free girl the way others wore their alligator logos or the letter jackets of their boyfriends.

  Thebes was so lame it might as well be amputated.

  Tabitha wasn’t going to make her mother’s mistake and get stuck here. She and Caleb would light out for someplace better. But not until Tabitha had seen Mom safely home. And if that meant sucking up big time, well then, Hello there, Mrs. Prendergast, you’re looking less smarmy than usual in that French-cut skirt—did you inherit it from your sister in Toronto after she died of liver failure? Hi, Mr. Hess! Remember me? Little Miss Crash-Crazy-Oopsy-Daisy? Morning, Mr. Reeves. Principal Reeves. Love the sideburns. I admire the man who can wear furry twin outlines of Florida below his ears. No, really.

  “You’re up to no good, I can smell it,” said Hogan as he arrived at the curb of the high school.

  “Coming in?” Her voice was sweet.

  “Shit. Left my geometry homework on the kitchen table. And I pulled an all-nighter to finish it.” Pausing. “Hell no.”

  “Right. Well, later.”

  Hogan started to ease away. Kirk was only halfway out of the car and he fell on the sidewalk, ripping a hole in his trouser knee. Hogan’s laughter trailed out into the drop-off traffic.

  “What?” Nice Kirk was nearly spitting. “He forgot I was in the backseat?”

  “I have to admit, Kirk,” ventured his sister, “you’re such a spaz. Hog probably just couldn’t help himself.”

  “I spent fifteen minutes pressing these trousers.”

  “Maybe today you’ll meet someone who can press them for you. Maybe, Kirk, today is your big day for love.” Oooh, she could be so mean. Good to know she hadn’t lost it.

  Kirk didn’t reply. He just limped off. Tabitha considered saying a prayer for strength, but then thought, fuck it, and she marched into the fray.

  SCHOOL NOT HAVING worked out quite as well as she would have liked, Tabitha found herself somewhat relieved, if that was the word, to show up with Hogan and Kirk at the clinic for visiting hours at four so they could see their mother, decay and all.

  They were huddled in the hallway, which smelled of disinfectant and pea soup. “Tell us what you know, über-nurse,” said Hogan.

  Nurse Marilee Gompers smiled hatefully and observed that Mrs. Scales could sit up, brush her own hair, attend to her own toilet, and as of today when they took it away from her, walk without the aid of a walker. Her blood pressure was good, her vital signs what they should be. She looked brightly and with focus at whoever came in the room. None of the tests had shown signs of hemorrhaging. No evidence of a subdural hematoma. The staff could think of no reason to keep her under observation. Since their mother didn’t have a regular physician with whom they could consult, the Scales kids took the nurse at her word when she said that the patient was fine.

  “She can talk?” asked Tabitha.

  “Go in and see for yourself. She’s a great one for talking, a regular Chatty Cathy.”

  They loitered until Nurse Gompers pushed them through the door. “I’ll shut this. For privacy,” she said, with a wink.

  Leontina Scales was sitting up in an ugly metal chair with one rectangular biscuit-colored cushion creased into the middle to provide both a seat and a back. Her spine sagged, her chin jutted forward, and she glowered at her children. “Outa here,” she groused. “Now. Outa here.”

  “But you need their help, Mom.” Kirk patted her wrist. She shrugged his hand off and he looked hurt, and tucked his hands in his armpits.

  “We can bust her out, she don’t have to stay if she don’t want,” said Hogan.

  “Let’s pretend to do this right,” said Tabitha. “As the oldest I get to make the decisions, I think.”

  “Outa here,” said Mrs. Scales, more forcefully

  “Too bad,” said Hogan, pretending to look, “there’s no plug for us to pull.”

  “She’s right to flee,” said a voice. They had forgotten to notice that their mother didn’t have a private room. In the next bed sat a wispy black woman with flyaway white hair. She wore a hospital gown and an IV bottle-feeder and a purple church hat with a little net veil lowered over her eyes.

  “What you in for?” said Hogan.

  “Life.”

  “Eww.”

  “As in livin’ too hard and I see no shame in that.”

  “Ow. Outa here,” said Mrs. Scales. “Ow.”

  “She’s got the right notion,” said the black woman. “In seven weeks and change Y-Two-Kay gonna kick some butt big time. I intend to be on the Other Side by the time it happens. You never seen the hell that’s gonna erupt outa the broken pipes of those computers.”

  “We don’t use computers much,” said Tabitha. “Doubt you do, either.”

  “You might not, I might not, but the world does. I seen it in my visions. Planes crashing out of the sky. Bank accounts frying, money sizzling away like water on Bo’more sidewalks in August. Trains crash, cars crash, markets crash, war and pestilence and famine on all sides. Four horsemen of the Apocalypse my foot: they gonna need two, three dozen horsemen minimum, to mop us all up. That’s why Jesus on His way again. What you think Y-Two-Kay mean, anyway?”

  “It means Year Two Thousand,” said Kirk. “The millennium.”

  “Millennium, my ass.”

  “Actually the millennium begins January 1, 2001, according to my math teacher.”

  “Your math teacher don’t know how to squat in the fields when she has to go. Computers are taking over the world and destroying it big time in seven weeks. Y-Two-Kay don’t stand for that, though. It
stand for Yahweh-to-Come.”

  “I thought you said Jesus,” said Hogan. “Get your facts straight, ma’am.”

  “Yahweh, Yehovah, Yesus, you think I write the name tag? Name don’t signify. He can be Yolanda Christ this time around if he wants. I’m outa here. He ain’t gonna be happy to see his world all broke.”

  “Haven’t you got family?” asked Kirk. “Any visitors?”

  “Kirk can be your little boy.” Tabitha pushed him forward. “We don’t need him any more.”

  “I thought Jesus gonna come from that Monica Jewinsky and Bill Clinton, but she’d a born him by now, unless the baby’s been holdin’ out till Y-Two-Kay midnight. One thing I’ll tell you right now, you can’t impeach God. Ain’t gonna happen.”

  Hogan sounded delighted. “The second coming—a bastard son of Slick Willy? I love it.”

  The woman nodded grimly. “The first black president, they call him. First and last, by the look of it.”

  By now Mrs. Scales had her hand around her ears, so Tabitha went to the nurses’ station. Nurse Gompers faked being busy over someone dying or something, but Tabitha wouldn’t leave. She didn’t want to go back in her mother’s room, even with the consolation that there was someone on earth more screwy than her own mother.

  Eventually Nurse Gompers condescended to recognize Tabitha, and she expounded on Mrs. Scales’s situation in maddeningly medical language. Despite that, Tabitha picked up that the clinic intended to release her mother into Tabitha’s own care.

  “Is that legal?” said Tabitha, losing track of her own intentions and her strategies.

  “The next of kin your family provided, Pastor Huyck called up this morning and I gave him my recommendation, and he approved it and faxed over a waiver. Close enough, he said.”

  “But Mom doesn’t talk like she used to. She’s not herself.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Nurse Gompers. She strode down the hall whacking the wall with her clipboard. Tabitha followed her into the room.

  “Well.” Tabitha knew this sounded lame. “Look. I mean, she won’t eat her Jell-O.”

  “Odd damned Jell-O.” Mrs. Scales knocked the dish on the floor.

  “They all do that,” said Nurse Gompers. “I would too. What’s your point?”

  “Oh I walk through the valley of darkness,” said Mrs. Scales. “Oh, evil shall I fear.”

  “You said she was religious. She’s always quoting something,” said the nurse.

  “The devil can quote scripture for his own purpose. And she the devil’s secretary, in my humble opinion,” said the woman from the next bed. “She works for the Big Snake. Watch your back, Nurse Gompers. She evil.”

  “Marilee, I say unto you,” said Mrs. Scales, “get lost.” She turned to the woman in the bed near the window. “Oh to hell, you.”

  “I call that a sense of humor,” said Nurse Gompers. “I’m not retracting the doctor’s discharge order because you don’t like your mother’s funnybone. Shame on you. How’s tomorrow, when school gets out?”

  “I’m busy,” said Hogan. “I could do two weeks from Thursday.”

  “Have mercy on me, a sinner, and get this vamp of Satan outa my sight,” said the older woman beneath the going-to-church hat. “My eyes sting in their sockets just lookin’ at her.”

  The next day Tabitha and Hogan came to pick their mother up. Pushing Mrs. Scales in a wheelchair out to the curb, Nurse Gompers seemed a bit harried. “Someone’s in rare form. Someone wants to go home in a big way.”

  “I kingdom come,” said Leontina Scales, hitting Nurse Gompers’s fingers with a complimentary satchel of aspirin, plastic shower cap, and thermometer. “I will be done!”

  Tabitha knew that her mother didn’t like her to drive since, among other reasons, Tabitha didn’t even have a learner’s permit. But Tabitha’s driving seemed of minor concern to Mrs. Scales today.

  “It’s so good she has an outlet in her church interests.” Settling her patient into the passenger seat, Nurse Gompers looked more than grateful. “She’s got a lot to offer, I can see that. Now make sure she takes her meals regularly. She seems to be hungry. But she wouldn’t touch her lunch.”

  “Eat us not into temptation.” Mrs. Scales spat on the sidewalk. Her children stared.

  “You’re talking about her as if she’s not here,” said Tabitha.

  “One more moment.” The nurse gritted her teeth. “I’m working to overcome my separation anxiety.” She narrowly avoided getting jabbed in the stomach by the handle of the wheelchair as Mrs. Scales kicked it backward from her place in the passenger’s seat.

  “Don’t be a stranger, dear,” said Marilee Gompers. She appeared to be talking to the wheelchair. “We’re always here for you.”

  “Oh, oh, for Christ’s sake, go,” said Mrs. Leontina Scales, “home, will you? Ill the Nazi bitch.”

  “Learning some new words, Mom,” said Hogan. “Hey lady, you done her some good.”

  “We do our best.” Nurse Gompers sat down in the vacated wheelchair, shooing the car away, away.

  “To hell!” cried Mrs. Scales, waving her hand at Nurse Gompers.

  “Mom,” said Tabitha, “are you trying to like make some kind of point again?”

  Mrs. Scales spread her hands out wide. She almost knocked Tabitha in the chin. “Ever again. Oh more doctors. Ever again, do you hear me? Odd can take care of me. Odd is my physician, and I’ll kill myself if you take me back there, do you hear me? Ooh you hear me? Abby, I’ll kill myself. At’s a promise. Odd is my managed care, no one else. Eave me alone.”

  “You’re talking crazy,” said Tabitha. “What’re you now, nuts? You’re on your way home. This isn’t the time for a tantrum.”

  “I’m to be born!” she cried. “I’m to die! I’m to plant! I’m to pluck up that which is planted! I’m to kill! I’m to heal!”

  “You’re to go home and get some supper, there’s Spaghetti-O’s,” said Tabitha.

  “I’m to get, and I’m to lose,” said Leontina Scales in a smaller voice. “I’m to keep silence.”

  She kept silence then. There was nothing to do but look at the town as they drove through. Concentrate on it, because it was hard to figure out what kind of thing was sitting there in the front seat where their mother should be.

  Thebes wasn’t a place that the Scales kids had ever given much thought to. Except for the occasional shopping trip to Syracuse or Watertown, and a tour of Boston once, Thebes was all they knew other than TV. But things aged in Thebes faster than on TV. More graffiti on the overpasses, more houses that had run out of money before the siding had gotten all the way around.

  “Repair ye the way of the Lord,” murmured Mrs. Scales, pointing at a road crew from the highway department drinking from Thermoses. They were taking a break from repaving the northbound lanes of 1-81.

  Tabitha’s eyes veered over to the road crew, checking them out. Two studly, three dudly.

  Mrs. Leontina Scales hit the dashboard with her hand. “Odd, odd, why hast Thou forsaken me?” she cried.

  “Momster.” Hogan leaned forward from the backseat. “Take a chill pill. What’s the matter? You’re going home.”

  She closed her eyes and put her hands up to her face. “Ow, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field,” she muttered. Tabitha glanced in the rearview mirror. After his demonstration of concern, Hogan was sinking back into his doldrums. He had pulled a small drum of dental floss from his shirt pocket and was twining a green strand around his fingers. Maybe he was going to try to strangle Mom from behind. He’d have to yank pretty hard.

  “Look,” said Tabitha, trying to be a TV daughter, “the colors are really late this year. Look, Mom, the reds over there behind Maxy’s Hardware. You don’t see reds like that often, even on cable.” Mrs. Scales didn’t look up.

  Maybe, thought Tabitha, she’ll be better when she gets home. Her things around her. Her friends to come calling. But what friends would those be? Hogan was a handful and so, Tabi
tha knew, was she, and her mother hadn’t had much in the way of friends since divorcing her third husband, Kirk’s dad. Too many wives scared she’d steal their husbands? Too many husbands scared they’d be stolen? Who knew? Maybe Tabitha could get Kirk to drop by Cliffs of Zion and put out a call for help. People must have heard what had happened. Pastor Huyck, that terminally perky sack of wind, must be spreading the word.

  Surely her mother would get better. But for now she looked a mess. Her hair was all wrong, for one thing. Some fool had combed it up and you could see the thinning patches. Well, Tabitha wasn’t going to start grooming her mother. It was hard enough to get a half hour in the bathroom for herself every morning, what with Kirk busy plucking every hair in his nostrils and who knew where else, for that matter.

  Tabitha rolled her eyes when she pulled up in the driveway. Kirk had made a sign. It was hung over the front door and was hand lettered to say WELCOME HOME!! Kirk was waiting by the door with his best Bride of Christ expression on.

  Mrs. Scales seemed to be making an effort to pull herself together. She got out of the car without comment. She stopped a few steps short of the aluminum storm door that was still shy of a lower panel of glass since the time, three years ago, that Hogan had drop-kicked the old cat through it. She looked up at her youngest son. Her face seemed to screw in and out as if she was struggling for depth of field. “A sight for sore eyes, Captain Kirky,” she managed.

  “Peace to all who enter here,” said Kirk, giving the Vulcan sign for something obscure and, thought Tabitha wistfully, with any luck obscene. “Seek and ye shall find rest.”

  “Am right I will,” said Mrs. Scales.

  “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” said Kirk.

  “Can the crap and let us through,” said Tabitha.

  Kirk steered Mrs. Scales into the living room and Tabitha and Hogan, no more than ghost images once Kirk was involved, followed bitterly.