Saint Maybe

4. Famous Rainbows

Holy Roller, their grandma called it. Holy Roller Bible Camp. She shut a cupboard door and told Thomas, “If you all went to real camp instead of Holy Roller, you wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every day. And I wouldn’t be standing here half asleep trying to fix you some breakfast.”

But it wasn’t the crack of dawn. Hot yellow bands of sunshine stretched across the linoleum. And she didn’t look half asleep, either. She already had her hair combed, fluffed around her face in a curly gray shower-cap shape. She was wearing the blouse Thomas liked best, the one printed like a newspaper page, and brown knit slacks stretched out in front by the cozy ball of her stomach.

One of the words on her blouse was VICTORY. Another was DISASTER. Thomas hadn’t even started second grade yet but he was able to read nearly every word you showed him.

“If you all went to Camp Cottontail like the Parker children you wouldn’t have to leave till nine A.M.,” his grandma said, inching around the table with a stack of cereal bowls. “An air-conditioned bus would pick you up at the doorstep. But oh, no. Oh, no. That’s too simple for your uncle Ian. Let’s not do it the easy way, your uncle Ian says.”

What Ian had really said was, “Camp Cottontail costs eighty dollars for a two-week session.” Thomas had heard the whole argument. “Eighty dollars per child! Do you realize what that comes to?”

“Maybe Dad could make a bit extra teaching summer school,” their grandma had told him.

“Dream on, Mom. You really think I’d let him do that? Also, Camp Cottontail doesn’t take three-year-olds. Daphne would be home all day with little old you.”

That was what had settled it. Their grandma had the arthritis in her knees and hips and sometimes now in her hands, and chasing after Daphne was too much for her. Daphne just did her in, Grandma always said. Dearly though she loved her.

She shook Cheerios into Thomas’s bowl and then turned toward the stairs. “Agatha!” she called. “Agatha, are you up?”

No answer. She sighed and poured milk on top of the Cheerios. “You get started on these and I’ll go give her a nudge,” she told Thomas. She walked stiffly out of the kitchen, calling, “Rise and shine, Agatha!”

Thomas laid his spoon fiat on top of his cereal and watched it fill with milk and then sink.

Now here came his grandpa and Ian, with Daphne just behind. Ian wore his work clothes — faded jeans and a T-shirt, his white cloth carpenter cap turned around backward like a baseball catcher’s. (Grandma just despaired when her men kept their hats on in the house.) He’d dressed Daphne in her new pink shorts set, and she was pulling the toy plastic lawn mower that made colored balls pop up when the wheels turned.

“The way I figure it,” Ian was saying, “we’d be better off moving the whole operation to someplace where the lumber could be stored in the same building. But Mr. Brant likes the shop where it is. So I’m going to need the car all day unless you …”

Thomas stopped listening and took a mouthful of cereal. He watched Daphne walk around and around Ian’s legs, with the lawn mower bobbling behind her. “This is what I’m bringing to Sharing Hour,” she announced, but Thomas was the only one who heard her. “Ian? This is what I’m—”

“You should bring something fancier,” Thomas told her.

“No! I’m bringing this!”

“Remember yesterday, what Mindy brought?”

Mindy had brought an Egyptian beetle from about a million years ago, pale blue-green like old rain spouts. But Daphne said, “I don’t care.”

“Lots of people have plastic lawn mowers,” Thomas told her.

She pretended not to hear and walked in tighter and tighter circles around Ian’s blue denim legs.

Once Daphne had her mind made up, nothing could change it. Everyone always joked about that. But Thomas worried she would look dumb in front of Bible camp. It was such a small camp that all the children were jumbled together, the three-year-olds in with the seven-year-olds like Thomas and even Agatha’s age, the ten-year-olds; even ten-year-old Dermott Kyle. Dermott Kyle would be sure to laugh at her. Thomas watched her round-nosed white sandals taking tiny steps and he started getting angry at her just thinking about it.

Then Ian bent over and scooped her up, lawn mower and all. He said, “What’s your breakfast order, Miss Daph?” and she giggled and told him, “Cinnamon toast.”

That Daphne was too ignorant to worry.

When Agatha came downstairs she looked puffy-eyed and dazed. She never woke up easily. Their grandma hobbled around her, trying to get her going — pushing the Cheerios box across the table to her and offering other kinds when Agatha shook her head. “Cornflakes? Raisin bran?” she said. Agatha rested her chin on her fist and her eyes started slowly, slowly drooping shut. “Agatha, don’t go back to sleep.”

“She’ll be fine once she hits fresh air,” Ian said. He was standing by the toaster, waiting for Daphne’s toast to pop up. He’d set Daphne on the counter next to him where she swung her feet and banged her heels against the cupboard doors beneath her.

“She’d be even finer if she could sleep till a decent hour,” their grandma told him. “Why, they’re having to get up earlier in summer than in winter! Poor child can barely keep her eyes propped open.”

“She ought to be in Camp Cottontail,” their grandpa said suddenly. Everyone had forgotten about him. He was scrambling himself some eggs at the stove. “Camp Cottontail comes to the house for them about nine o’clock or so; I’ve seen the bus in the neighborhood.”

“Wasn’t I just saying that? While Holy Roller, on the other hand—”

“It’s not Holy Roller, Mom. Please,” Ian told her. “It’s Camp Second Chance. And it’s sponsored by my church and it’s free of charge. Not to mention it offers the kids a little grounding for their lives.”

Their grandma looked up at the ceiling and let out a long, noisy breath.

“When I was seventeen,” their grandpa said from the stove, “I volunteered to be a counselor at my church’s camp out in western Maryland. That’s because I was in love with this girl who taught archery there. Marie, her name was. I can see her still. She wore this leather cuff on her wrist so the bowstring wouldn’t thwack her. Every night I prayed and prayed for her to love me back. I said, ‘God, if you’ll do this one thing for me I’ll believe in you forever and I’ll never ask another favor.’ But she preferred the lifeguard and they started going out together. After that, why, me and God just never have been that chummy.”

“God and I,” Grandma murmured automatically.

“I mean I still go to church on holidays and such, but I don’t feel quite the same way about it.”

Ian said, “Well, what does that prove? Good grief! You act as if it proves something. But all it proves is, you didn’t know what was best for you. You were asking for a girl who wasn’t right for you.”

Their grandpa just shrugged, but their grandma said, “Oh, Lord, it’s too early in the day for this,” and she dropped heavily into a chair.

Agatha’s eyes were closed now and Daphne had stopped swinging her feet. The dog lay next to the sink like a rumpled floor mat. Only Ian seemed to have any pep. He plucked the toast from the toaster, flipping it a couple of times so it wouldn’t burn his fingers. As he turned to bring it to the breakfast table, he gave Thomas a quick little wink and a smile.

While Ian was driving them to camp he said, “You mustn’t take it too seriously when your grandma and grandpa talk that way. They’ve had some disappointments in their lives. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe deep down.”

“I know that,” Thomas said, but Agatha just stared out the side window. She always got grumpy and embarrassed when talk of religion came up. Thomas suspected she was not a true Christian. He knew for a fact that she hated going to Camp Second Chance. Even the name, she said, made it seem they were settling for something; and what sort of camp has just a backyard, above-ground, corrugated plastic pool you have to fill with a garden hose? But she said this privately, only to Thomas. Neither one of them would have hurt Ian’s feelings for the world.

Ian dropped them off at Sister Myra’s house in a rush; he was running late. “Morning, Brother Ian!” Sister Myra called from her front door, and he said, “Morning, Sister Myra. Sorry I can’t stop to talk.” Then he drove away, leaving them on the sidewalk. Sister Myra lived in a development called Lullaby Acres where no trees grew, and it was hotter than at home. Thomas could feel a trickle of sweat starting down between his shoulder blades.

“My, don’t you three look spiffy,” Sister Myra said, opening the screen door for them. She was a plump, smiley-faced woman with a frizz of sand-colored curls. “What’s that you got with you, sweetheart?” she asked Daphne.

“This here is my lawn mower.”

“Well, bring it on in where it’s cool.”

It wasn’t just cool; it was cold. Sister Myra’s house was air-conditioned. Thomas thought air-conditioning was wonderful, even if it did mean they tended to stay inside as much as possible. Today, for instance, no one at all was playing in the brownish backyard around the swimming pool. Everybody was down in the basement rec room, which felt like a huge refrigerator. Dermott Kyle and Jason were lining up dinky plastic Bible figures in two rows across the indoor-outdoor carpet, making believe one row was ranchers and the other was cattle rustlers. Three girls were dressing dolls in a corner, and the Nielsen twins were helping Sister Myra’s daughter Beth put today’s memory verse on the flannelboard: As the hart … and then a word that Thomas couldn’t figure out. He hoped the verse was a short one. Dermott Kyle had asked yesterday for Jesus wept, and it made the other campers laugh till Sister Myra pointed out how sad He must have been for our sins.

“We have three more people to wait for,” Sister Myra said. “Mindy and the Larsons. Then we can begin. You all stay here with Sister Audrey while I go up and watch for the others.”

Sister Audrey was sitting on a child’s stool way too small for her. She was a big, soft, pale teenager in tight cutoffs and a tank top that showed her bra straps. When she heard her name she smiled around the room and hugged her potato-looking bare knees, but nobody smiled back. They were scared to death of Sister Audrey. She was helping out at Bible camp because she’d had a baby when she wasn’t married and put it in a Dempster Dumpster and now she was atoning for her sin. They weren’t supposed to know that, but they did. They discussed the details amongst themselves in whispers: how the baby had been wrapped in a towel (or Dermott said a grocery bag), how a janitor heard it peeping, how a police car took it where somebody grown could adopt it. Sister Audrey smiled at them hopefully while they clustered in the doll corner and rehashed this information. “Doesn’t anybody want me to read them a story?” she called, but they weren’t about to get that close to her; no, sirree.

Sister Myra came back downstairs with Mindy and one of the Larsons, Johnny. Kenny was home with the earache, she said. “Something for us to mention in our prayers,” she told them, and she clapped her hands. “All right, campers! Gather round! Everybody pull up a chair!”

Some of the chairs were little wooden ones, painted in nursery-school colors. Others were regular folding chairs, and all the boys fought for those so they wouldn’t look sissy. Especially Thomas. He couldn’t bear to have Dermott Kyle mistake him for one of the babies.

“Our Lord in Heaven,” Sister Myra said, “we thank You for another beautiful day. We thank You for these innocent, unsullied souls gathered in Your name, and we ask for Kenny Larson’s recovery if it be Thy will. Now we’re going to offer up our sentence prayers as we do every morning at this time.”

That last part was spoken more to the campers than to God, Thomas felt. Surely God knew by now they offered up sentence prayers every morning. He must know what they were going to say, even, since most of them just repeated what they’d said on other mornings. The girls said thank-yous—“Thank You for the trees and flowers,” and such. (With Agatha, it was, “Thanks for the family,” in a mumbling, furry tone of voice.) The boys were more likely to make requests. “Let the Orioles win tonight” was commonest. (“If it be Thy will,” Sister Myra always added in a hurry.) The only exception was Dermott Kyle, who said, “Thank You for air-conditioning.” That always got a laugh. Thomas usually asked for good swimming weather, but today he prayed for Kenny Larson’s earache to go away. For one thing, Kenny was his best friend. Also Thomas liked to come up with some different sentence now and then, and this one made Sister Myra nod approvingly.

Sister Audrey offered the closing sentence. “Dear God,” she said, “look down upon us and understand us, we humbly beg in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Some of the boys nudged each other at that, because she probably meant He should understand about the Dempster Dumpster. But then they caught Sister Myra’s frown and so they put on their blankest faces and started gazing around the room and humming.

After Devotions came Sharing Hour. In school they called it Show and Tell. You didn’t have to bring anything to Sharing Hour if you didn’t want to, and most of the boys didn’t. Also what you brought didn’t have to be religious, although of course it was always nice if it was. It could be just some belonging you’d been blessed with that you wanted others to share the joy of. Sister Myra’s daughter Beth, for instance, brought a beautiful silver whistle that used to be her cousin Rob’s from Boy Scout camp. But when it came time to let others share the joy of it, she refused. She said she didn’t want people blowing it and passing on their germs. “Well, honestly, Beth,” Sister Myra said, looking cross, but Beth said, “I got a right! I don’t have to put up with all and sundry’s summer colds!” She was a skinny stick of a girl who never seemed that healthy anyway. Her nose was always red, and her braids were the pale, pinkish color of transparent eyeglass frames. Sister Myra sighed and said, “Anybody else?”

Daphne stood up so hard that her chair fell over backward. (You were supposed to raise your hand.) “Well, I have this,” she announced, and she held the toy lawn mower over her head. All the girls said, “Aw!” They thought she was cute. Then the boys, Dermott and the nine-year-olds, said, “Awww,” making fun of the girls, but you could tell they didn’t mean any harm. They were smiling, and Daphne smiled back at them. Then she showed how the colored balls popped up when she pushed the lawn mower across the carpet. She was cute, Thomas realized. She was darling, with her springy black curls as thick as the wig on a doll and her face very small and lively. He felt suddenly proud of her, and also, for some reason, a little bit sad.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Sister Myra said. “Any other sharers?”

Agatha raised her hand. Thomas looked over at her; she hadn’t mentioned she was bringing something. She stood up and rooted through her front pocket, knotting her mouth because she was kind of fat for her shorts and it was hard to get her fist around whatever it was. Finally she pulled out something round and clear. “A mustard seed,” she said.

Sister Myra said, “A what, hon?”

“A mustard seed in a plastic ball, like what Reverend Emmett talked about yesterday at Juice Time.”

“Oh, yes: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard …’ ” Sister Myra said. She held out her hand, and Agatha let the object drop into her palm. “Why, I remember these! We wore them on chains back in high school. We bought them at Woolworth’s jewelry counter.”

“It used to be my mother’s,” Agatha said.

Thomas’s mouth fell open.

“My mother’s dead now, and I don’t know what church she belonged to. But when Reverend Emmett showed us those mustard seeds at Juice Time I thought, ‘That’s what that is! That round ball in my mother’s box.’ ”

Their mother’s jewelry box, she meant, the cloth-covered box Agatha kept her barrettes in; and she was evil, evil to show other people something from the mysterious bottom drawer. Hadn’t she made Thomas cross his heart and hope to die if he told anyone their mother’s things were hidden there? She wouldn’t even let him tell Daphne, because Daphne might tell the grownups and then the grownups would go through their mother’s papers and figure out a way to ship Thomas and Agatha off to strangers, keeping Daphne for themselves since Daphne was the only true Bedloe. Agatha had warned him a dozen times, and now look: here she was, speaking of “my” mother, of how “I” don’t know what church she belonged to, while their mother’s private mustard seed traveled from hand to hand like something ordinary. From Sister Myra’s cushiony palm to Beth’s wiry, freckled claw to Dermott Kyle’s not-very-clean fist, and by the time it reached Thomas he believed he caught the smell of sweat. He held it up by its tiny gold ring and studied it at eye level. (He was no more familiar with it than the others were, since Agatha guarded that box so jealously.) Had the plastic been this scratched and clouded even before the others handled it? If so, then it was because of his mother’s touch; her actual fingers had rubbed off the shine. Her actual eyes had looked upon that white glint of a seed.

He didn’t really remember their mother, to tell the truth. When he tried to picture her, he had the vaguest recollection of following some red high-heeled shoes down a sidewalk and then looking up to discover they belonged to the wrong lady. “Mama!” he had cried in a panic, and there’d been a flurry of footsteps, a low, soft laugh … but he couldn’t put together what she’d looked like. It seemed that whenever he tried he came up with a sort of general mother, the kind you imagine when someone reads out the word “mother” in a storybook. He’d asked Agatha once, “Did she used to have a station wagon, maybe? I think I remember a car pool, a lady in the car pool at my nursery school—”

But Agatha said, “What are you talking about? She didn’t even know how to drive!”

“I must’ve mixed her up with someone else,” he said.

But the car-pool lady stayed on in his mind — someone like other children had, waiting for him in a brown station wagon with wood-grained panels on the sides and a rear compartment full of tennis-ball cans and lacrosse sticks.

“The best thing is, Agatha’s brought us something having to do with our faith,” Sister Myra said. “She listened to what Reverend Emmett talked about at Juice Time and then she brought something related to that. Very nice, Agatha.”

Agatha nodded and sat down in her chair. When Thomas passed the mustard seed to Jason, he felt he was parting with a piece of himself, like an arm.

* * *

The Bible verse for the day came from the Forty-second Psalm: As the hart panteth after the water brooks … First Sister Myra explained what it meant. “Does everyone know what a hart is? Anyone? Anyone at all?” Then she helped them memorize it, breaking the verse into phrases that they repeated after her. This was all in preparation for the Bible Bee, which was a kind of spelldown that happened every Friday. Sometimes they competed against other camps — last week, Lamb of God from Cockeysville. Lamb of God had won.

After Bible Verse it was time for Morning Swim. The girls changed upstairs in Beth’s room and the boys changed in the workshop off the rec room. They met in the backyard. At first the sun felt wonderful, soaking into Thomas’s chilled skin, and then all at once it felt too hot, way too hot, so that he was glad to race the others to the pool and clamber up the three wooden steps and drop into the lukewarm water. Sister Myra was the lifeguard. She stood hip-deep with her swimsuit skirt floating out around her and tried to make the boys stop splashing the girls. Sister Audrey watched the baby pool, which was an inflatable rubber dish nearby. She wore her same tank top and cutoffs and didn’t even remove her flip-flops but sat high and dry in a folding chair she’d dragged out, smiling or else squinting at the little ones as they sailed their toy boats and poured water from their tin buckets.

Jason said the Dumpster had been parked behind the stadium, but Dermott said Mondawmin Mall.

After their swim they sat down for lunch at two redwood picnic tables on the patio. That way they didn’t drip across Sister Myra’s floors; they’d be dry before they’d finished eating. It was Mindy’s turn to ask the blessing (not a chance Dermott Kyle would get another turn, not after last time!), and then they had bologna sandwiches and milk. Dessert was little foil packets of salted peanuts because Sister Myra’s husband worked for a company that made airplane meals and he got a special discount. By now they’d used up all their energy and they were quieter. Daphne fell asleep with her head on the table halfway through her sandwich. Thomas pumped a mouthful of milk from one cheek to the other to hear the swishing sound. Dermott asked, dreamily, “Does everybody see flashes of white light while they’re chewing tinfoil?”

Still in their swimsuits, they were herded downstairs (Daphne sagging over Sister Myra’s shoulder), where they unrolled their blankets from home and stretched out on the floor for their naps. Sister Myra sat in a chair above them and read aloud from the Bible-story book with its queerly lightweight paper and orange drawings: “The Boy Jesus in the Temple,” today. (How rude He was to his parents! But there must be some excuse for it that Thomas was still too young to understand.) The idea was, the little ones would sleep and the older ones would just rest and listen to the story. Thomas always meant to just rest, but Sister Myra’s low voice mingled with the creaks overhead where Sister Audrey was clearing away lunch, and next thing he knew the others were rolling their blankets and Reverend Emmett had arrived for Juice Time.

Reverend Emmett was tall and thin and he never seemed to get hot, not even in his stiff white shirt and black trousers. All the children loved him. Well, all except Agatha. Agatha said his Adam’s apple was too big. But the others loved him because he acted so bashful with them. A grownup, scared of children! He said, “How are our campers today? Enjoying this beautiful weather?” and when somebody (Mindy) finally said, “Yup,” he practically fell apart. “Oh! Wonderful!” he said, all flustered and delighted. Then he sat down on one of the nursery-school chairs so his knees jutted nearly to his chin, and the others settled on the floor in a circle while Sister Myra and Sister Audrey passed out paper cups of apple juice. Reverend Emmett took a cup himself. (In his long, bony fingers, it looked like a thimble.) He said, “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” and he smiled so happily into her face you would think he’d never heard of the Dempster Dumpster. Sister Audrey blushed and backed away and stepped on one of the Nielsen twins’ hands, but since she was wearing her flip-flops it must not have hurt much. The twin only blinked and went on staring at Reverend Emmett.

Sometimes Reverend Emmett talked about Jesus and sometimes about modern days. Thomas liked modern days best. He liked hearing about the Church of the Second Chance: how it had started out meeting in Reverend Emmett’s garage where the floor was still marked with oil stains from Reverend Emmett’s Volkswagen. Or even before that: how Reverend Emmett, an Episcopal seminarian and the son of an Episcopal minister, had gradually come to question the sham and the idolatry — for what was kneeling before a crucifix but idolatry? — and determined to found a church without symbols, a church without baptism or communion where only the real things mattered and where the atonement must be as real as the sin itself, where for instance if you broke a playmate’s toy in anger you must go home immediately and fetch a toy of your own, of as good or better quality, and give it to that playmate for keeps and then announce your error at Public Amending on Sunday. Or how Reverend Emmett’s fiancée had dumped him and his father had called him a crackpot although his mother, the smart one in the family, had seen the light at once and could even now be observed attending Second Chance every Sunday in her superficial Episcopal finery, her white gloves and netted hat. But that was all right, Reverend Emmett said. To condemn a person for fancy dress was every bit as vain as condemning her for humble dress. It’s only the inside that counts.

Today he talked about how meaningful it was that he should come for these chats of theirs at Juice Time. “This way,” he told them, “it’s a period of spiritual nourishment as well as physical.” Then he put it more simply for the little ones. “You don’t get just apple juice, you get the juice of heavenly knowledge besides.” He said, “How lucky you are, to have both at once! Most children have to choose one at a time — either nourishment for the soul or nourishment for the body.”

“Isn’t there anything else?” Agatha wanted to know.

“Excuse me?”

But she shrugged and picked at a cuticle.

“And even young as you are, you can still bear witness,” Reverend Emmett said. “You can live in such a way that people will ask, ‘Who are those children? And what is the secret of their joy?’ That’s what ‘bearing witness’ means, in our faith — not empty words or proselytizing. Those cigarette smokers and coffee addicts and sugar fiends in their big expensive churches, contributing to the Carpet Fund and sipping their communion wine which we all know is an artificial stimulant—‘Why are those children so blessed?’ they’ll ask. For you are blessed, my little ones. Someday you’ll appreciate that. You’re luckier than you realize, growing up in a church that cares for you so.”

Then he took a small brown bottle out of his trouser pocket and said it came from Kenny Larson’s doctor. He said all the campers had to have eardrops before they went in Sister Myra’s pool again.

Next came Crafts, where they made framed scripture plaques from drinking straws. And after that, Song Time, where they sang, “I’ve got the peace-that-passeth-understanding down in my heart, down in my heart …” as fast as possible in hopes that someone’s tongue would get twisted, but nobody’s did. And then Afternoon Swim, the longest single, period of the day. Thomas thought maybe Sister Myra had lost all her zip by then and just let them go on swimming because it was easiest. During their nap she had changed back into her skirt and blouse (probably for Reverend Emmett’s visit, even though clothes were not supposed to matter), and she didn’t bother getting into her swimsuit again but sat on a chair next to the pool with her skirt pulled up above her knees and her face tipped back to catch the sun. Still, you couldn’t put a thing past her. “No dunking allowed, Dermott Kyle!” she called, although Dermott was barely beginning to move in Mindy’s direction and Sister Myra’s eyes were closed. Her face was so freckled that it had a spattered look, as if someone had thrown handfuls of beige spangles at her.

Thomas knew how to swim — Ian had taught him last summer — but he hated getting his head wet. He swam straining out of the water, his arms flailing wildly and splashing too much. Agatha swam a slow, steady breast-stroke like an old person. Her gaze was fixed and her chin stayed just under the surface, so that she looked obstinate. Dermott Kyle, naturally, was wonderful at every stroke there was and also claimed to be able to dive, although he couldn’t prove it because Sister Myra didn’t have a diving board.

In the baby pool, Sister Audrey stood ankle-deep and bent over with her hands in the water. Johnny Larson was emptying a sprinkling can on top of Percy’s head. Daphne was … Thomas couldn’t see Daphne. He waded toward the edge of his own pool to check, and that’s when he realized that the thing in Sister Audrey’s hands was Daphne’s little blue-flowered body.

Later, he couldn’t remember how he got out of the water so fast. It almost seemed he was lifted straight up. Then he was running, with the sharp, stubbly grass pricking his bare feet, and then he was flying through the air as level as a Frisbee and belly flopping into the baby pool where Daphne lay on her stomach, smiling, making splashy little pretend-swim motions while Sister Audrey supported her.

He grabbed hold of Daphne anyway. (It seemed he’d been wound with a key and had to follow through with this.) He struggled to his feet, staggering a bit, hanging onto her even though she squirmed and protested. “You leave her alone,” he told Sister Audrey. Sister Audrey stared at him; her mouth was partway open. Thomas hauled Daphne out of the pool, dumped her in a heap, brushed off his hands all businesslike, and then strode back to the big pool.

As soon as he was in the water, the others crowded around him asking, “What’d she do? What happened?” Sister Myra looked confused. (For once, she had missed something.) Thomas said, “I just don’t like her messing with my little sister, is all.” He set his jaw and gazed beyond them, over toward the baby pool. Sister Audrey was standing on dry ground now. She was concentrating on stepping back into her flip-flops, and something about her lowered head and her meek, blind smile made Thomas’s stomach all at once start hurting. He turned away. “Boy, you were out of here,” Dermott Kyle said admiringly.

“Oh, well, you do what you got to do,” Thomas told him.

Toweled dry and dressed, their swimsuits hanging on the line outdoors and their hair still damp, they gathered for Devotions. Sister Myra said, “Dear Lord, thank You for this day of fellowship and listen now to our silent prayers,” and then she left a long, long space afterward. Silent prayers were sort of like Afternoon Swim; you had the feeling she was too worn out to make the effort anymore. Everyone was worn out. Still, Thomas tried. He bowed his head and closed his eyes and prayed for his mother in heaven. He knew she was up there, watching over him. And he knew his prayers were being heard. Hadn’t he prayed for Ian not to go to Vietnam that time? And the draft notice came anyhow and Thomas had blamed God, but then the doctors found out Ian had an extra heartbeat that had never been heard before and never given a moment’s trouble since, and Thomas knew his prayer had been answered. He’d stood up at Public Amending the following Sunday and confessed how he had doubted, but everyone was so happy about Ian that they just smiled at him while he spoke. He had felt he was surrounded by loving feelings. Afterward, Reverend Emmett said he thought Thomas had not really sinned, just shown his ignorance; and he was confident it would never happen again. And sure enough, it hadn’t.

“In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen,” Sister Myra said.

They all rustled and jostled and pushed each other, glad to be moving again.

It was Agatha’s turn to sit in front, but Ian said they should all three sit in back because he was picking up Cicely on the way home. “She’s coming for supper,” he told them. “It’s a state occasion: Aunt Claudia’s birthday. Remember?”

No, they hadn’t remembered, even though they’d spent last evening making a birthday card. Daphne said, “Oh, goody,” because that meant all the cousins would be there. Thomas and Agatha were glad, too — especially on account of Cicely. They both thought Cicely was as pretty as a movie star.

Ian asked Daphne what the day’s Bible verse had been. Daphne said, “Um …” and looked down into her lap. She was sitting in the middle, with her legs sticking straight out in front of her and the lawn mower resting across her knees.

“Agatha?” Ian called back, turning onto Charles Street.

Agatha sighed. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,” she said flatly, “so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.”

She mumbled the word “God,” so she almost didn’t say it at all, but Ian appeared not to notice. “Good for you,” he said. “And what did Reverend Emmett talk about?”

Agatha didn’t answer, so Thomas spoke up instead. “Juice,” he said.

“Juice?”

“How we get juice for the soul and juice for the body, both at once, in Bible camp.”

“Well, that’s very true,” Ian said.

“It’s very dumb,” Agatha said.

“Pardon?”

“Besides,” she said, “isn’t ‘juice’ a bad word?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It just has that sound to it, somehow, like maybe it could be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ian said. They had reached a red light, and he was able to glance over his shoulder at her. “Juice? What?”

“And that pool is full of germs; I think everybody pees in it,” Agatha said. “And Sister Audrey makes the sandwiches so far ahead they’re all dried out before we get to eat them. And anyhow, what’s she doing in a children’s camp? A person who’d put a baby in a Dempster Dumpster!”

By now, those words were like some secret joke. Thomas giggled. Ian looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“You’re laughing?” he asked.

Thomas got serious.

“You think Sister Audrey is funny?”

A driver behind them honked his horn; the light had turned green. Ian didn’t seem to hear. “She’s just a kid,” he told Thomas. “She’s not much older than you are, and had none of your advantages. I can’t believe you would find her situation comical.”

“Ian, cars are getting mad at us,” Agatha said.

Ian sighed and started driving again.

I’m just a kid too, Thomas wanted to tell him. How would I know what her situation is?

They took a left turn. Daphne sucked her thumb and slid her curled index finger back and forth across her upper lip, the way she liked to do when she was tired. Thomas kept his eyes wide open so no one would see the tears. He wished he had his grandma. Ian was his favorite person in the world, but when you were sad or sick to your stomach who did you want? Not Ian. Ian had no soft nooks to him. Thomas tipped his head back against the seat and felt his eyes growing cool in the breeze from the window.

On Lang Avenue, with its low white houses and the sprinklers spinning under the trees, Ian parked and got out. He climbed the steps to Cicely’s porch, meanwhile taking off his cap. “Ooh,” Agatha said. “He’s got horrible hat-head.” Thomas had never heard the phrase before, but he saw instantly what she meant. All around Ian’s shiny brown hair the cap had left a deep groove. “He looks like a goop,” Agatha said. That was her way of comforting Thomas, he knew. It didn’t really help much, but he tried to smile anyhow.

When Cicely came to the door, she was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. A beaded Indian headband held back her long messy waterfall of curls. First she stood on her toes and gave Ian a kiss. (All three of them watched carefully from the car. For a while now they had been worrying that Cicely didn’t like Ian as much as she used to.) Then she waved at them and started down the porch steps. Ian followed, clamping his cap back on.

Daphne took her thumb out of her mouth. “Hi, Cicely!” she called.

“Well, hey, gang,” Cicely said. “How we doing?” She opened the door on the passenger side and slid across to the middle of the front seat. The car filled with the moldy smell of the perfume she’d started wearing.

Ian got in on the driver’s side and asked, “Have a good day at work?”

“Great,” Cicely said. (This summer she worked part-time at a shop where they made leather sandals.) She moved over very close to him and brushed a wood shaving off his shoulder. “How was your day?”

“Well, we got a new order,” Ian said.

“Right on!”

He pulled into traffic and said, “This woman came all the way from Massachusetts with a blanket box, her great-grandfather’s blanket box. Asked if we knew how to make one just like it, using the same methods. Exactly the kind of thing Mr. Brant likes best.”

Cicely made a sort of humming noise and nestled in against him.

“Soon as she left Mr. Brant told me, ‘Go call those kitchen people.’ People who wanted an estimate on their kitchen cabinets. ‘Call and cancel,’ he said. Cicely hon, stop that, please.”

“Stop what?” she asked him, in a smiling voice.

“You know what.”

“I’m not doing anything!” she said. She sat up straight. She slid over to her side of the car and set her face toward the window. “Mr. Holiness,” she muttered to a fire hydrant.

“Pretty soon we may give up kitchens altogether,” Ian said, turning down Waverly. He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “We’ll build nothing but fine furniture. Custom designs. Old-style joinery.”

Cicely wasn’t listening. All three of them sitting in back could tell that, just from the way she kept her face turned. But Ian said, “We might hire another worker, too. At least, Mr. Brant’s thinking about it. I said, ‘Good, hire several, and give me a raise while you’re at it,’ and he said he might do it. ‘I won’t be a single man forever,’ I told him.” Ian glanced over at Cicely when he said that, but Cicely was still looking out the window.

It was amazing, how he could talk on like that without realizing. When even they realized! Even little Daphne, sucking her thumb and watching Cicely with round, anxious eyes!

Thomas all at once felt so angry at Ian that he jumped out of the car in a rush and slammed the door loudly behind him.

Their grandma said they had to change clothes at once, this instant, because Aunt Claudia was arriving at five-thirty and they looked as if they’d spent the day rolling in a barnyard. She told Ian to run Daphne a bath, and she said, “Clean shirts for the other two! And clean shorts for Thomas. Hair combed. Faces washed.”

But the minute Ian’s back was turned, Thomas followed Agatha up the narrow, steep wooden stairs to the attic. He trailed her into the slanty-ceilinged attic bedroom that was hers and Daphne’s, that used to be Aunt Claudia’s when she was a girl at home. “Agatha,” he said, putting on a fake frown, “do you think we should’ve bought Aunt Claudia a present? Maybe a card will be too boring.”

What he was after, of course, was a glimpse of their mother’s jewelry box. He knew Agatha had to open it to return the mustard seed.

“You heard what Grandma said,” Agatha told him. “A handmade card means more than anything. What are you in my room for?”

“But she gives us presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”

“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”

“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”

“Get out, I tell you.”

“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”

“No, you can’t.”

“She wasn’t only your mama, you know.”

“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”

“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”

“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.

“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”

“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”

“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”

“You’ll get it dirty.”

“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”

She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.

“Well, okay,” she said finally.

“You’ll let me?”

“But just for a minute.”

She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic — the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things — maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once when he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.

She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.

It was a color photograph, with JUN 63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks — black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress — holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.

If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.

It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person — as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.

“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.

“You don’t remember being there?”

“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”

“Where was our father?”

“Maybe he was taking the picture.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”

“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”

“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid off the bed, not forgetting to be careful of the picture. “Then, Agatha!” he said. “Listen! Maybe that’s how we could find where we used to live.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could ask for the trailer with the rainbow.”

She gave him a look. He could see he’d walked into something, but he didn’t know what.

“Well, they must have maps of things like that,” he said. “Don’t they? Maps that show where the really big, really famous rainbows are?”

“Thomas,” Agatha said. She rolled her eyes. Clearly it was almost more than she could manage to go on dealing with him. “For gosh sake, Thomas,” she said, “rainbows don’t just sit around forever. What do you think, it’s still there waiting for us? Get yourself a brain someday, Thomas.”

Then she took hold of the picture — with her fingers right on the colored part! — and pulled it out of his hands and carried it back to the closet.

“Thomas?” Ian called from the second floor. “Are you cleaned up?”

“Just about.”

He would never know as much as Agatha did, Thomas thought while he was clomping down the stairs. He would always be left out of things. People would forever be using words he’d never heard of, or sharing jokes he didn’t get the point of, or driving him places they hadn’t bothered to tell him about; or maybe (as they claimed) they had told him, and he had just forgotten or been too little to understand.

“Last night I dreamed a terrible dream,” Aunt Claudia said at dinner. “I think it had something to do with my turning thirty-eight.”

She was twisted around in her seat, feeding baked potato to Georgie in his high chair. Over her shoulder she said, “I opened the door to the broom cupboard and this burglar jumped out at me. I kept trying to call for help but all I managed was this pathetic little whimper and then I woke up.”

“How does that relate to turning thirty-eight?” her husband asked her.

“Well, it’s scary, Macy. Thirty-eight sounds so much like forty. Forty! That’s middle-aged.”

She didn’t look middle-aged. She didn’t have gray hair or anything. Her hair was brown like Ian’s, cut almost as short, and her face was smooth and tanned. Her clothes weren’t middle-aged, either: jeans and a floppy plaid shirt. Whenever Georgie got hungry she would tuck him right under her shirt without unbuttoning it and fiddle with some kind of snaps or hooks inside and then let him nurse. Thomas thought that was fascinating. He hoped it would happen this evening.

“You know what I believe?” she asked now, wiping Georgie’s mouth with a corner of her napkin. “I believe what I was trying to do was, teach myself how to scream.”

Grandpa said, “Why, hon, I would think you’d already know how.”

“I was speaking figuratively, Dad. Here I am, thirty-eight years old and I’ve never, I don’t know, never said anything. Everything’s so sort of level all the time. Tonight, for instance: here we sit. Nice cheerful chitchat, baseball standings, weather forecast, difficult ages eating in the kitchen …”

By “difficult ages,” she meant the older children — ten to fifteen, Agatha to Abbie. The “biggies,” Grandma called them. The people with exciting things to say. Thomas could hear them even from the dining room. Cindy was telling a story and the others were laughing and Barney was saying, “Wait, you left out the most important part!”

Here in the dining room, there were no important parts. Just dull, dull conversation among the grownups while the “littlies” secretly fed their suppers to Beastie under the table. Cicely was holding up a pinwheel biscuit and carefully unwinding it. Ian kept glancing over at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, Claudia,” Grandma said, “would you prefer it if we moaned and groaned and carried on?”

“No, no,” Claudia said, “I don’t mean that exactly; I mean … oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m just going through the middle-aged blues.”

“Nonsense, you’re nowhere near middle-aged,” Grandma told her. “What an idea! You’re just a slip of a girl still. You still have your youth and your wonderful life and everything to look forward to.” She raised her wineglass. Thomas could tell her arthritis was bad tonight because she used both hands. “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said.

Macy and Grandpa raised their glasses, too, and Cicely set aside the biscuit to raise hers. Ian, who didn’t drink, held up his water tumbler. “Happy birthday,” they all said.

“Well, thanks,” Claudia told them.

She thought a moment, and then she said, “Thank you very much,” and smiled around the table and took a sip from her own glass.

The cake was served in the living room, so they could all sing “Happy Birthday” together. But really just the grownups and the little ones sang. The difficult ages seemed to think singing was beneath them, so after the first line Thomas didn’t sing either. Then just as Claudia was blowing out the candles, Mrs. Jordan arrived from across the street along with two of the foreigners. The foreigners brought a third foreigner named Bob who apparently used to live with them. Bob greeted Thomas by name but Thomas didn’t remember him. “You were only so much high,” Bob told him, setting his palm about six inches above the floor. “You wore little, little sneakers and your mother was very nice lady.”

“My mother?” Thomas asked. “Did you know her?”

“Of course I knew her. She was very pretty, very kind lady.”

Thomas was hoping to hear more, but Mrs. Jordan came over then and started filling Bob in on all the neighborhood news: how Mr. Webb had finally gone to be dried out and the newlyweds had had a baby and Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin daughters were making life a living hell for his girlfriend. Thomas wandered off finally.

His grandma was passing the cake around on her big tole tray. She served the grownups first. She said, “Macy, cake? Jim, cake?” She offered some to Ian, too, but of course he said no. (At church they didn’t approve of sugar, as Grandma surely knew by now.) She thinned her lips and passed on. “Jessie? You’ll have cake.”

Ian asked Cicely, “What do you say to a movie after this?”

“Well, I kind of like made plans with some friends from school,” Cicely told him.

“Oh.”

“Melanie and them from school.”

“Okay.”

“I’d ask you along except it’s, you know, like all just college talk about people you never heard of.”

“That’s okay,” Ian said.

Thomas hooked his fingers into one of Ian’s rear pockets. He slid his thumb back and forth across the puckery seam at the top. What did this remind him of? Daphne sucking her thumb, that was it. Curling her index finger across her upper lip. He leaned his head against Ian’s side, and Ian put his arm around him. “I should get to bed early anyhow,” he was telling Cicely. “Rumor has it tomorrow’s another workday.”

Now Grandma was offering her tray to the children. She said, “Thomas? Cake?”

“No, thanks.”

“No birthday cake?” she asked. She put on a look of surprise.

“Sugar is an artificial stimulant,” he reminded her.

He expected her to argue like always, but he didn’t expect she’d get angry. Ian was the one she seemed angry with, though. She turned toward Ian sharply and said, “Really, Ian! He’s just a little boy!”

“Sure. He’s free to make up his own mind,” Ian said.

“Free, indeed! It’s that church of yours again.”

“Excuse me. Mrs. Bedloe?” Cicely said. “Maybe Thomas is just listening to his body. Processed sugar is a poison, after all. No telling what it does to your body chemistry.”

“Well, everybody in this room eats sugar and I don’t exactly notice them keeling over,” Grandma said.

“Me, now,” Cicely said, “I’ve started using non-pasteurized honey whenever possible and I feel like a whole new person.”

“But honey is a stimulant, too,” Thomas told her.

Ian said, “Thomas. Hey, sport. Maybe if we just—”

“Do you hear that?” Grandma asked Ian. “Do you hear how he’s been brainwashed?”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“It’s not enough that you should fall for it yourself! That you’d obey their half-wit rules and support their maniac minister and scandalize the whole neighborhood by trying to convert the Cahns.”

“I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”

“A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s been a nation! Oh, I will never understand. Why, Ian? Why have you turned out this way? Why do you keep doing penance for something that never happened? I know it never happened; I promise it never happened. Why do you persist in believing all that foolishness?”

“Bee, dear heart,” Grandpa said.

Now Thomas noticed how still the room had grown. Maybe Grandma noticed too, because she stopped talking and two pink spots started blooming in her cheeks.

“Bee,” Grandpa said, “we’ve got a crew of hungry kids here wondering if you plan on coming their way.”

The others made murmury laughing sounds, although Thomas didn’t see anything so funny. Then Grandma quirked the corners of her mouth and raised her chin. “Why! I certainly doo-oo!” she said musically, and off she sailed with her cake.

The frosting was caramel. Thomas had checked earlier. His grandma made the best caramel frosting in Baltimore — rich and deep and golden, as smooth as butter when it slid across your tongue.

Daphne went off at nine, kicking up a fuss in Ian’s arms because the cousins were still there, but Thomas and Agatha got to stay awake till the last of the guests had said good night — almost ten-thirty, which was way past their normal bedtime.

“Don’t forget your baths!” Ian called after them as they climbed the stairs, but Thomas was too sleepy for a bath and he fell into bed in his underwear, leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes and saw turquoise blue, the color of Sister Myra’s swimming pool. He heard the clatter of china downstairs, and the rattle of silver, and the slow, dancy radio songs his grandma liked to listen to while she did the dishes. (She would be washing and Ian would be clearing away and drying; she always said the hot water felt so good on her finger joints.) “Where do you want these place mats?” Ian called. Loud announcers’ voices interrupted each other in the living room; Grandpa was hunting baseball scores on TV. “… never saw Jessie Jordan so gossipy,” Grandma said, and someone shouted, “BEEN IN A BATTING SLUMP SINCE MID-JUNE—”

“Could you turn that down?” Grandma called.

Then Thomas must have slept, because the next thing he knew the house was silent and he had a feeling the silence had been going on a long time. There wasn’t even a cricket chirping. There wasn’t even a faraway truck or a train whistle. The only sounds were those scraps of past voices that float across your mind sometimes when there’s nothing else to listen to. “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” Reverend Emmett said, and Grandma said, “Why, Ian? Why?”

Thomas should have told her why. He knew the answer, after all. Or, at least, he thought he did. The answer is, you get to meet in heaven. They’ll be waiting for you there if you’ve been careful to do things right. His mother would be waiting in her frilly pink dress. She would drive her station wagon to the gate and she’d sit there with the motor idling, her elbow resting on the window ledge, and when she caught sight of him her face would light up all happy and she would wave. “Thomas! Over here!” she would call, and if he didn’t spot her right away she would honk, and then he would catch sight of her and start running in her direction.