Agatha of Little Neon Read online

  Pete was the first to find a feather: one floated down and landed on his knee. Another appeared, and they kept coming one by one, then all at once. At the altar, Father Steve was busy transubstantiating, too lost in the task to notice until everyone in the pews was already smiling about it: the church had filled with fine white feathers. The fans sent them high, like snow in reverse. We watched the tiniest of them drift down, and just when we reached and tried to grab them, they’d catch the breeze and rise back up. They hovered and spun mid-flight, turned up and over themselves, drifted and dipped in faltering arcs.

  Someone sneezed, then sneezed again.

  “Oh, wow,” Father Steve said into the microphone, when he looked out from the pulpit, chalice in his hand. The whole spectacle was marvelous, and absurd; I was helpless with wonder.

  Horse said, “Oh my God, look.”

  We turned to see what she was pointing at: Lawnmower Jill was standing in the back of the church, beaming. She held a baby in one arm, and she’d split the sleeve of her coat open so the baby could reach into the nylon and pull out the down inside and toss handfuls of feathers into the air. She kept tearing open new sections of her coat and giving the baby more feathers to send into the air. The baby was giggling, flinging her head back so she could see all the tiny bits of plumage levitate. I smiled to see it.

  “What in the Sam Hill,” Frances whispered.

  “She’s acting like a child,” Therese said, and she stepped over everyone’s feet on her way out of the pew. She started down the aisle, feathers clinging to her as she went. The baby’s mother got there first and held out her hands for Lawnmower Jill to give her the baby. When she didn’t, the woman yanked the baby from Lawnmower Jill’s hands. Then Therese took Lawnmower Jill by the elbow and led her up the aisle to sit in our pew.

  “Okay, people,” Father Steve said. “Kill the fans.”

  Someone switched them off, and the feathers dropped slowly onto our heads. We lined up for Communion in a daze. I knew, waiting in line, that I was supposed to be solemnly reflecting on the significance of the Eucharist, but I was still giddy with delight, busy picking feathers from the folds of my habit when Father Steve held a wafer in front of my face and said, “Body of Christ.” I needed a second to remember to say, “Amen.”

  24.

  It took Lawnmower Jill nearly six hours to sweep up all the feathers and vacuum out all the air-conditioning vents. Deacon Greg had her clean out all the holy-water fonts, too, where the feathers had clotted together.

  We decided not to tell Abbess Paracleta about the feathers, but Frances still felt it was important to come up with a way to punish Lawnmower Jill. In the garage she pulled out Lawnmower Jill’s file so she could make a note of her “misconduct,” as she called it. In the folder Frances learned that Lawnmower Jill had lived in Rhode Island all her life. She’d been raised by other people’s parents: in foster homes, a group home, and, for eighteen months when she was sixteen, a juvenile detention center. She got a flu shot every year. She had once stabbed the dog of a sworn enemy. Another time she drove her car into the public pool after a near-fatal number of Narragansetts. She did not believe in God. But she could, the abbess noted, be convinced to pray.

  When we worked in the day care, we’d read books about disciplining young children, and we’d all come away with different ideas as to what was best. Therese believed in withholding. She wanted to refuse Lawnmower Jill dinner.

  I didn’t see what the big deal was. “She already cleaned it all up,” I said. “Besides, she’s a grown woman.”

  “Maybe the answer is positive reinforcement,” Mary Lucille said.

  “Oh, so we should shower her with praise every time she decides not to make a giant mess?” Therese said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Mary Lucille said.

  “Let’s just talk to her,” Frances said.

  So when Lawnmower Jill came home from work, Frances asked her if she might take a little walk with us, and she said she was tired, and Frances said she didn’t really have a choice, and Mary Lucille said please, and then Lawnmower Jill said fine. Therese and Frances walked up front, next to her, and Mary Lucille and I walked behind them.

  She knew what was coming. “I was just taking the baby for a walk,” Lawnmower Jill said, before anyone could say anything. “She wouldn’t stop fussing, and she liked the sound of the music coming from the church, and then she grabbed at a loose feather, and she was so happy when the fan made it fly—”

  “I understand,” Mary Lucille said, craning her neck to be heard. “You were just trying to distract her.”

  “No, I was trying to make her happy,” Lawnmower Jill said. “Which is different.”

  Frances said, “But, well. It got out of control. You can’t just give a baby everything she wants. You can’t indulge every cry. You have to learn to say no.”

  Lawnmower Jill stopped walking. “Everything is some kind of moral issue with you people,” she said. I felt my pulse race. The four of us looked at her and watched her composure come to pieces. “I’m sick of it. It makes my blood boil. Have you ever noticed that I don’t give two shits? Or even one shit? No, no—half a shit. I don’t give half a shit what you think. No, in fact, take a shit and cut it into eighths—no, sixteenths, and one of those sixteenths is more precious to me than anything you have to say, about anything, ever.”

  We stared. After a moment Lawnmower Jill said, “Fuck it,” and marched off in the direction home.

  When she was out of earshot, Frances crossed her arms and sighed. “This will have to go in her file.”

  25.

  I lay in bed that night and thought of Mother Roberta, how sometimes rage shot through her and turned her electric. There was this memory I kept returning to: one afternoon Father Thaddeus had made her angry, and I saw her push a leather armchair so hard it turned up and over itself.

  It was never any one thing that made Mother Roberta angry; it was everything together. I imagined that her personal litany of grievances ran through her mind at all times, like endless ticker tape. Disappointments of every size and scale. Even when she wasn’t outwardly angry, there was always a reminder that she had been, once, or was still, silently: the frown lines between her brows; the way she walked heavy, heels first and hulking; the shards of broken glass in the sink.

  Now I think it had something to do with love. The church she loved had never become what she wanted; the church she’d loved all her life was reluctant to change. She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love.

  26.

  After dinner one night Tim Gary asked if anyone wanted to walk to the big tire and back. It was a half mile to where a big black monster truck tire had washed up on the riverbank. The methadone made his stomach upset and he could use some air, he said. Therese and I went with him. As we walked, he told us a story about his ex-wife.

  The winter Tim Gary fell sick, his wife took him to the Sears in Warwick. It had been forever since he’d been in a mall. They stood together on the same stair of the escalator, and it brought them high up into the air, and in the space between one floor and the next, he and his wife let go of each other’s hands and looked out at the wild terrain: noisy and sleek and bright, aglow with colors and humming with life. They soared up over the food court and leaned their heads back: above them was a ceiling so high and vast and luminous, it was as if the sky they’d known—the place from which balloons never returned, blue and dreamy and faraway—had been replaced with this new pale heaven.

  His wife, he told us, was smarter and had seen more of the world than he. She read the newspaper and muttered to herself about what was there. She went on long walks to be away from him. The mall was one of their last voyages together, and Tim Gary felt close to her in that moment, this woman who locked herself in the bathroom each morning, who had stopped accompanying him to the hospital to sit next to him during his treatments. He wished in that moment that the escalator ride would never e
nd—that the great big staircase would carry them up above the ceiling, above the troposphere, and his wife and he could grip the handrail and watch the people below them eat pizza, the pretty pepperonis getting smaller and smaller until they were microscopic, until they were so small they could not be seen.

  And then something snagged, and he was flat on the floor, staring up at the man-made ceiling. He cried out and struggled to free the bootlace that had caught in the escalator’s teeth. He looked up to his wife, and she glanced at him, but she did not kneel to help. She stood above him, arms crossed. She laughed as if she’d seen it coming, as if she’d known all along he wasn’t ready for something as sophisticated as the escalator, and chances were he’d never be.

  When we reached the tire, Tim Gary asked us if we thought the tire would stay there forever. Each of us tried to move it with our hands and feet, but none of us could make it budge, so we all agreed that it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  27.

  Mary Lucille came home with a big bag of art supplies from the thrift. Squares of felt, mismatched gel pens, plastic beads in tubes, clumps of nylon yarn, loose sequins, dried-up markers and paints. Every Friday we’d try something new, she said. Every week a new project.

  She’d found enough watercolor sets for everyone to share, so we all sat side by side at the kitchen table. “Why do we have to?” said Lawnmower Jill, and Mary Lucille said it was for the enrichment of her soul, to which Lawnmower Jill groaned.

  It was dark and warm, quiet except for the whir of the fan in the window. We were hunched over our paints when Abbess Paracleta came through the front door.

  “What’s all this?” she asked, standing in the kitchen.

  “We’re painting,” Horse said. She held up her paper. “Mine’s an alien.”

  “How fun,” the abbess said. “I brought soup.” She held up a plastic tub of green liquid.

  “Thank you. Join us,” Therese said. “Pull up a stool.”

  The abbess put the soup in the fridge and then came to the table to paint. Mary Lucille gave her a spare brush and a sheet of paper.

  “I’m afraid I’m not very good,” the abbess said, staring at the bright discs of paint in front of her.

  “Neither is anyone at this table,” Therese said, “except Baby.” His cheeks flamed, but he didn’t look up.

  Mary Lucille decided to tape everyone’s paintings to the wall behind the corduroy couch. The paper was water-warped, the paintings slapdash. But I liked to look at them all together. Lawnmower Jill’s had turned into a gradient of brown where unlike colors found each other. Tim Gary had made the exact right shade of green to paint Little Neon: a lot of yellow and a little blue. There was Horse’s purple alien, and Lawnmower Jill’s black Cadillac, and Baby’s red cardinal, and Pete’s bananas. And the abbess’s dragonfly, Therese’s mountain, and Mary Lucille’s horse (more of a rhinoceros), and Frances’s daisy, and my evergreen tree.

  Therese stood on a step stool and poised each painting in the air, and Tim Gary stood back and told her how to move the paper. “Left, left, left, a little more left, okay, lift the right side just a—stop. Yes. Perfect.” He did this for each piece of paper, and when they were all stuck on the wall, he looked more pleased than I’d ever seen him.

  * * *

  The abbess stayed for a glass of water, into which she squirted Metamucil from a bottle she kept in her purse. It turned opaque, the color of cantaloupe.

  “That soup I brought will heat up beautifully,” she said, “for dinner tomorrow.”

  “What kind?” Horse said.

  “Split pea,” the abbess said, and Horse made a face. “You’re lucky it’s not cabbage,” the abbess said in response. And then with no prelude, she asked about everyone’s sobriety. She was blunt; she had no time for liars. She looked each Neon in the eye and asked them if they’d been using. And when everyone said no, ma’am, she asked us if the pee tests were coming back clean.

  It was Therese who was handling everyone’s urine Monday mornings. She was the only one who had the stomach for it. She held each warm cup that was handed to her and called it a “specimen.” She had to wait five minutes for the panel on the front to change colors; then she had me confirm everything. The cups tested for meth and pot and pain pills and crack cocaine and ketamine and a whole bunch of things I’d never heard of, and there was a little test strip for each one. “Is that two lines there?” Therese would ask, holding a cup in the air, up to the light, and I would look and say yes. Two lines was good. One line was bad. So far we’d only ever had two lines.

  When Therese told the abbess all the specimens were coming back clean, the abbess looked happy. She asked how everyone had been enjoying Mass, and Lawnmower Jill crossed her arms and slumped in her chair. Tim Gary said, “I like it.”

  “Good man,” the abbess said. “Keep it up, and you never know how you might be rewarded. You might just meet someone. Someone special. Any of you might.”

  “Nah,” Tim Gary said. “Doubt it.”

  “Plenty of people go to church to find love,” the abbess said. “It’s why I went, when I was younger. I was sixteen. I learned how to put on lipstick, and I wanted boys to see me. Church was the best place to be on display.”

  On display! I laughed: I’d never imagined vanity on the list of reasons a person might find themself in a pew. I’d assumed Abbess Paracleta was the kind of nun whose faith developed before her gums had teeth.

  Mary Lucille always thrilled to a love story. “Did it work?” she asked. “Did boys notice you?”

  “Some of them worked up the nerve to ask me out,” the abbess said, matter-of-factly, “but I didn’t give them the time of day. It was easy to turn them down. I got so taken with God, I didn’t have eyes for anyone else.”

  “That’s how it was for me,” Frances said, wistful.

  “Not me,” Tim Gary said. “I wasn’t getting asked out in high school, and I wasn’t getting close to God, either.” Church didn’t make him feel good, he said, when he was younger. He didn’t develop much of a way with God. “Church was always just digging up the worst parts of me.”

  “But what about now?” Therese asked.

  “Now it feels like it’s the only thing that’ll keep me going.” He stared at his lap. “I’m all out of alternatives; I’ve tried everything else.”

  “You know, there’s a verse in Deuteronomy,” Mary Lucille said. “‘Be not afraid, for God goes with you; He will not forsake you.’”

  “Or how about Isaiah,” Therese said. “‘Those who hope in the Lord will soar on eagles’ wings.’”

  “Griffins’ wings, too,” Baby said, smiling at Tim Gary.

  “They’re real, dammit,” Tim Gary said, but he smiled back.

  Abbess Paracleta had a psalm about how God turns mourning into dancing.

  “Sisters,” Lawnmower Jill said. “Enough. Please. Enough of the Bible.”

  But they kept going. They took turns listing verses. They had an endless supply. A lot of the lines they quoted seemed only tenuously related to Tim Gary’s situation. But he was patient. He sat still as they recited.

  And then, when they’d run out of things to say, he said, “I hope that all turns out to be true. I really do hope.”

  “‘Need is not quite belief,’” Pete said. After a moment: “That’s Anne Sexton.”

  28.

  Lawnmower Jill went missing on baked potato night. She didn’t come home for dinner, and then she didn’t come home for bed.

  We stayed by the front window, watching the dark, starting at everyone who walked under the streetlamp. After curfew, when there was no sign of her, Frances called the abbess, and the abbess didn’t answer.

  We panicked; we were on edge. We decided to split up. Two would stay home and wait, and the other two would walk to the Tedeschi, where Lawnmower Jill worked, and ask after her.

  “Agatha and I will go,” Therese said. She stepped into her shoes and bent to tie them.

  “But I want
ed to,” Mary Lucille said.

  “Stay here and wait,” Therese said, without even turning her head.

  Therese and I didn’t speak a word. We rushed down the street in the dark, our habits swishing. The Tedeschi was so brightly lit we could spot it from blocks away. Up close it was even brighter. When we swung the door open, a bell chimed, and all of the store was spread before us: aisles stacked with candy bars and puffed-up bags of chips, a whole wall of refrigerated beverages standing upright. In the corner, glossy hot dogs turned over themselves on a rack.

  The girl behind the register looked about nineteen. She wore a red apron over her pregnant belly and took a swig from a jug of orange pop. The name tag pinned to her apron said “Mickey.” “Can I help you?” she said.

  We told her we were looking for Lawnmower Jill. It took Mickey a minute to understand what we wanted her for, since Mickey was right there and could point us to whatever aisle we needed, but when Therese told her Lawnmower Jill didn’t come home for dinner, Mickey said, “Oh. Hmm. She’d never miss dinner.”

  Mickey told us to check the park, or the riverbank near the bridge, or Ick’s tavern. We checked the river, and then started toward Ick’s, but two blocks in we stopped.

  “Her Bronco,” Therese said, plaintive, pointing ahead. The mower was parked a half a block up on Getchell Avenue, outside a triple-decker. I recognized it: one of the other halfway houses.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “Maybe she’s just gone in to visit a friend,” Therese said.

  When we called the abbess in the morning, she said she already knew. Lawnmower Jill had told her she wanted out. She was tired, she’d said, of people acting as if God was worth her time. Then Getchell had an opening, and she was next on their waitlist. She’d left with all her stuff in a backpack, without goodbye.