Beauty from Ashes

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7

“I hear a voice of one crying in the wilderness,” Grandma Lucy’s saying. I can’t tell now if she’s preaching or praying or quoting Bible verses from memory or what. She’s got one hand raised up toward the sky like she’s the stinking Statue of Liberty. I still haven’t figured out why she looks familiar to me. “Weeping and great mourning,” she continues, and I surprise myself by actually recognizing the reference. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but for a few years in Massachusetts, I was really into youth group and church junk like that.

It’s kind of funny in a way, and also kind of sad, how into that lifestyle I got during those few years I spent with Sandy. I mean, I wasn’t just the sullen foster kid the pastor’s wife dragged to church on Sundays. I couldn’t wait to go. All my friends were at church, not at that preppy white-kid charter school where nobody like me would even dream of trying to fit in. And it wasn’t like Sundays were the only church days. Youth group on Tuesdays. Bible quiz Thursdays. I still remember that youth pastor with his crazy dreadlocks and corny T-shirts. But you know what? He knew about my past and didn’t judge me. Not once. And he made sure I fit in. I think he must have planned it behind my back, because the very first night I showed up at youth group, three different girls asked for my phone number, and two of them texted me a day or two later.

It seems so long ago, that time at Sandy’s church. But I loved everything about it. I was so naïve back then, so stinking starved for love. I would do anything to feel like I belonged. Even stand up at that youth retreat and walk up to the front of the aisle, knees shaking, head dizzy like I’d just downed a can of beer on an empty stomach. And I didn’t just stand there at the altar and pray for forgiveness. I actually knelt. Clasped my hands in front of me and sobbed my heart out to the God who promised to wash away all the mistakes of my past.

Nobody warned me back then about religion, about how you might escape your guilt, but you can’t throw off your DNA no matter how hard you try. And that’s how it worked. I did it all, the spiritual retreats, the abstinence pledges, everything the people at Sandy’s church said I should. I’d forgotten about it until just now, but I even woke up an hour early once a week my whole junior year to attend this before-school Bible study. I was completely sold out. I read this book once, this collection of stories of Christian martyrs, and I remember thinking, I’m going to be just like them when I grow up. I even told Sandy I thought God wanted me to become a missionary.

It’s hard to say what happened. Halfway through my junior year I started sleeping with Lincoln Grant. (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, that was his real name.) He wasn’t my first but the only one I’d been with since I moved in with Sandy, the only one I’d been with since I walked down that aisle in tears, desperate to sell my soul to God like some affection-starved hooker on her knees begging for acceptance.

So I was giving into temptation with Lincoln every so often, but I always felt bad afterward. Always asked God to forgive me. Told him I’d try to be stronger next time. I was still reading the Word nearly every day and working hard on the Bible quiz team, and maybe you’d think that makes me a hypocrite, but I just think it makes me a human. I mean, nobody’s perfect, right? And who’s to say the kid who sneaks someone like Lincoln Grant into her foster family’s bedroom window is any worse than the so-called Christian girls who were so eager to spread the juicy gossip once they found out what we were doing?

Grandma Lucy’s going on and on, and it’s the same basic verse — I remember it from Bible quizzing, remember it because it was so morbid and I never got why they made us memorize it — except she’s saying it differently. I wonder if she’s been reading from the augmented Bible, or whatever that version is where they add so much extra stuff. I wouldn’t know. But it’s a little off from what I recall.

“The voice of a mother weeping for her child.”

My hands are clammy, and my heart feels like it did that day at the youth retreat before I walked down the aisle. Jittery, like I’ve had caffeine dumped into my veins. How did she know? She’s never met Natalie. Nobody in this room has except me and Jake.

“Weeping tears that fall like angel dust before the throne of God.”

Angel dust? Sounds like something you’d stick under your tongue at a rave. But just when I think that Grandma Lucy’s gone completely off script, there it is again. That feeling in my chest, that flutter. Like this stranger is some kind of psychic who can read my thoughts. Knows exactly what I’ve gone through.

“Refusing to be comforted,” she says, and all of a sudden, her raised palm is leveled straight at me, like she’s Iron Man aiming her shooting beam or whatever it’s called right at my forehead. “Refusing to be comforted because her children are no more.”

So there it is. I hate to admit it, but for half a minute there, she almost had me going. Almost had me believing that she was talking directly to me. I’m not superstitious, but when you think about all the things she was saying, that could have been me. Almost. I let out my breath, realizing now how long I’ve been holding it in, and stare at that awful salmon blouse she’s wearing.

I shut my eyes for a minute. Stupid of me to let her get under my skin like that. Stupid of me to believe that some ancient grandmother who probably hasn’t upgraded her wardrobe since the seventies could actually be talking to me. She’s nothing. Just a batty old woman rambling on because the pastor was stupid enough to hand her the mic.

A batty old woman who needs to shut up so I can get out of this church and get home to my little girl.