The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Fifteen

He didn’t know where his mother was buried, a fact that left him feeling strangely unmoored. Even if he hadn’t seen her in years, he had always known where she was. Now he could only make an educated guess. He parked on the cemetery road halfway between her family’s plots and his father’s family, or at least where he thought he remembered they were. Assuming his father would have put her in the Newquist section, Mitch got out of the Saab and was starting to hike over the grass in that direction when he looked a little way up the hill and saw something disturbing. A young woman was attempting to get out of a van, but it looked to Mitch as if she was having some kind of difficulty doing it.

He watched her, until he was positive she was in trouble.

Then he jogged the few yards up the hill to where she clung with one hand to the door handle on the driver’s side of her van and the other hand on the car seat. As he got close he could see the handles of a wheelchair folded behind the driver’s seat. But she looked as if she was attempting to walk without it.

“Can I help you?” Mitch called out to her.

“No,” she said in a breathless voice. “I can do it.”

No, you can’t, was Mitch’s thought as he saw her take her hand off the door handle, then sway and grab for it again. She didn’t look even thirty years old, more like twenty-five, and she wore the telltale head scarf of the chemo patient. When she looked at him her eyes were big and dark in her face. He read both fear and determination in them.

“I’m walking that way, myself,” he said, drawing close enough to see how her muscles looked like strained and trembling ropes in her forearms as she tried to stand and balance. “Grab hold of my arm and I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“No thanks, really, I can make it.”

She took, or tried to take, a step, but immediately stumbled and had to reach for support again. This time when she looked at him he saw that she was close to bursting into tears. And this time, when he put out his right arm to her, she didn’t argue, but instead grabbed onto him as to a life preserver.

“I thought…” she started to say apologetically.

“I know.” He grinned down at her. “I’m stubborn, too.”

That forced a little smile from her and a little warmth into her eyes.

She was so light he barely felt her pressure on his right arm. He started to walk her away from her van but then discovered that that wasn’t going to work, either. She could barely shuffle one foot in front of the other.

“You really need to get over there?” he asked her.

“I have to. I have to.”

“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pick you up and carry you.”

Her eyes widened even more. “Oh, no. You’ll hurt yourself.”

He smiled. “I doubt it.”

She didn’t object as he reached down, put one arm under her knees and the other under her back, and gently hoisted her up to a level at which he could carry her.

“You okay?” he checked with her.

She bit her bottom lip and nodded.

“Okay, then just point me to where we’re going.”

She lifted one thin arm and pointed to an old-fashioned upright tombstone that had a pinkish tint. Mitch shut her van door with one foot and then he carried her where she wanted to go.

“Put me on the grass,” she told him.

“On your feet?” he asked, doubtfully.

“No,” she whispered. “So I can sit.”

With her in his arms, he bent his knees until he could gently transfer her to the ground. She propped herself up with her own arms then, reminding him of the spindly woman in a famous old Andrew Wyeth painting called “Christina’s World.”

“I could prop you against the stone,” he suggested.

For a moment she looked taken aback, but then she seemed to accept that she was going to need some support in order to sit upright. She nodded and he picked her up again and put her down again, this time with her thin back against the solid comfort of the pink granite.

“I’ll be over there,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the Newquist plots.

“Okay,” she said, gazing up at him. “Thank you.”

“When you’re ready to go, give me a wave.”

“I will.”

It wasn’t until he walked away and then turned around to check on her that Mitch looked at the stone above the grave she was so determined to visit. She had managed to adjust her position so that she was leaning her right side against one edge, with her right arm pressed up against it, her left hand splayed against the bottom of it, and a single line of engraving visible above that hand.

Peace Be Unto You, the engraving said, but there wasn’t any name, only a year: 1987.

Mitch hadn’t known what he would feel when he finally stood at his mother’s grave, but he hadn’t expected it to be restlessness. He found he couldn’t stand there at all, he had to move, and so he began strolling around the cemetery, periodically glancing back to see if the sick girl needed him.

It was only when he happened upon Margie Reynolds’s grave that he actually felt the emotions he had wondered if he would feel for his mother. First of all, he was shocked. Mrs. Reynolds died? Then came anger that he hadn’t been told about her, and then sadness for a woman he had liked a whole lot better than he had liked his own mother. He checked the dates of her birth and death and figured out that Abby had been twenty-eight when Margie had died. They’d had a close and loving relationship.

It must have nearly killed you, he thought, of Abby.

Before he even consciously realized what he was doing he was pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and opening it to a small photograph inside. His six-year-old son grinned up at him, and Mitch smiled back down at the picture, feeling a sudden sharp pang of missing the boy, who was with his mother for the week.

Mitch held his wallet out to Margie Reynolds’s grave.

“This is Jimmy,” he said softly. “My son.”

He found himself telling her more. “We have joint custody. I guess it works okay. Better than only getting him on weekends. You’d probably like my ex-wife. I know she’d like you. I probably could have tried harder, but it just didn’t work out for us. I thought I loved her enough to marry her, but then I’ve thought a lot of things that didn’t turn out to be true…”

Mitch folded the wallet closed and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Anyway. That’s Jimmy. I’m sorry you won’t get to see him.”

It killed him to think that Jimmy was born a whole year before Margie Reynolds died. If there had been some way to bring his son down to meet her…

Hers was a funeral he might have come to, Mitch thought, but then he realized, no, there was no way he could have done that and faced Abby. And no way he could have walked into the Reynolds’s home for the first time with a son that he’d had with another woman. With that thought, and the memory of seeing Abby together with Patrick, Mitch felt a rise of grief that nearly staggered him. For a moment, he thought he was going to need somebody to hold him up, like he had supported the sick girl. But there wasn’t anybody who could do that. He forced himself to tamp down the sorrow and the devastating disappointment.

There’d been a place inside him where he had still held out hope.

Suddenly Mitch felt the rise of the old anger again, a red, vicious, pulsating fury, accompanied by the cry that had echoed in his skull for seventeen years: I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve this. This was my town, too.

Something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.

He looked up the hill. The young woman was waving at him, a limp, slight wave, but it got her message across.

Fueled by the energy of his anger, Mitch walked quickly up the hillside to her.

“Ready to go?”

She nodded and even held up her arms to him, like a child, to be picked up. This time when he did it, she smelled of grass.

As he did it, he asked, “Who’s buried here?”

“The Virgin,” she said.

“Excuse me? Who?”

“The Virgin.” When she didn’t see comprehension in his face, she said, “Don’t you know who the Virgin is?”

“Never heard of her.” He thought she felt even lighter in his arms, if that was possible.

“She’s a girl who was murdered a long time ago. A horrible murder, and nobody knew who she was. She had been beaten so badly that they couldn’t even identify her. Her face was all beaten in.”

Mitch stumbled on a clod of dirt, causing her to shift in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

He thought he was going to be sick.

“That’s okay,” she said, though she had gone even paler and there was sweat beading her upper lip now. Still, she kept on telling him the story. “So, what happened was, the people of this town gave her a funeral and they buried her in that grave. And they say that out of gratitude she heals people and helps them.”

He suddenly felt so ill that he thought he was going to have to put her down and turn away and actually throw up in the bushes.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He swallowed. “I’m okay. Do you live around here?”

“Me? Oh, no, I’m from Wichita.”

“Then how did you ever hear about…the Virgin?”

“She’s kind of famous, like that place in France…”

“Lourdes?”

“Yeah, that’s the one, where they say the water cures you.”

He felt bile rising in his chest again, and fought it back.

“I asked her to help me,” the girl told him in a reverent whisper.

“Did you?” They had returned to her van. “Here we are again.”

Mitch gently set her on her feet long enough to allow him to open her van door for her, and then he helped her back into it.

“Is it cancer?” he asked bluntly, looking into her wide eyes in her thin face.

She nodded, and then stuck out one thin hand. “I’m Catie.”

“Mitch,” he said, and took the hand. “How far do you have to go? Are you sure you can drive?”

“Not far. I’m staying in town. And really, I’m okay when I’m driving.”

Mitch stood by the side of the road and watched her leave the cemetery. There had been a kind of happy glow to her face as she gave one last look out her side window at him. If nothing else, the visit to the grave seemed to have made her happier for a little while.

When she was gone, he walked slowly back to the grave of the girl that Catie had called the Virgin. Mitch stood staring down at it for a long time, until enough other people began to enter the cemetery with their memorial flowers that he began to worry about getting spotted by somebody he knew.

One last time, he looked at the gravestone.

“So they couldn’t identify you,” he said with a cynical, bitter twist to his tone. “But there’s one person who still knows who you are, isn’t there…Sarah?”

On his way out of the cemetery in his own car, he looked to the side, right into the face of a woman who looked vaguely familiar to him, as if she might have been someone with whom he had gone to school. Mitch didn’t allow any expression to enter his eyes, but he thought he saw a startled spark of recognition in hers.

“Screw it,” he thought angrily, as he found himself turning left toward town instead of right toward the interstate up north. “If I didn’t have a good reason to stay longer before, I do now.”

His heart was pounding hard as he crossed the town limits.

As he slowly drove around the once-familiar streets of Small Plains he put on his sunglasses again, and his Royals baseball cap, and he propped his left arm on the doorsill to hide the side of his face. He took in the surprising fact that downtown looked better than he remembered it, but he also noticed a number of FOR SALE signs placed in storefront windows.

His father, Abby’s father, and Rex’s father had considered Small Plains to be their territory, their fiefdom, theirs by right of inheritance by their own fathers and grandfathers before that. As Mitch drove around, an idea began to grow in him of how he might get a measure of revenge, and possibly even justice.

He recalled his own vow to himself: I’ll never forget. I’ll never forgive.

He thought of a beautiful girl with her face beaten, her identity erased as if she had never existed, and he thought of how too many years had gone by without him doing anything about it.

Feeling a turbulent mix of fear, anger, and resolve, Mitch turned his car toward a bit of acreage and a small ranch house that his family had owned. He was betting it was still there and that his father still owned it. If the ranch house was still there, if they hadn’t sold it or rented it to somebody else, if the keys were still hidden where they had been for all the early years of his life, if it was still habitable, then that’s where he would spend the night.