The Patron Saint of Liars

So if my driving bothered him, he didn’t say. If my lateness bothered him, sometimes all the way through dinner, he didn’t tell me. I did try to be on time, and nearly every day I was. It’s just that I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths. I would listen to Thomas, who slept so quiedy beside me, and feel the warmth of his body in bed with me, and I would think, what makes something a sign from God? What makes something right? I didn’t even know what I was thinking of, but I could feel it pressing down on me when I slept, when I ran the vacuum, when I picked out the wallpaper, bought cereal, wrote home.

The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving. The world moved because of the directions of my hands. I rushed it past my windows as fast as I wanted. At first I knew where I was going. I would make up excuses, little reasons that took me farther and farther away, and then I gave up. I was never going anywhere and there was no sense lying to myself. People think you have to be going someplace, when, in fact, the ride is plenty. I loved to drive early in the morning, before the traffic started up. I loved to drive in the hard rains and see the world blur and clear beneath my windshield wipers. When it was dark I could see the lights of the other cars speeding by me and when it was sunny I would roll down the car window and look for the islands, Anacapa or Catalina, through a tangle of my own hair. I bought maps in every town, stuffed the glove compartment with directions. When I studied them late at night, after Thomas was asleep and the pain in my chest had gotten me up again, I was never interested in where I might go, only the contours of the roads, the kind of lines they made, their shape and width, the views I imagined they would afford me. This is what I was looking for.

I continued to light my candles up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, though I was less sure now of what to ask for. The first sign had simply changed the shape of my life, left me sharing an apartment with one person instead of another. There was a loneliness in being answered, as if God and I had less to say to each other now. I put in my coins and took my match from the box, pressed my forehead to my hands in prayer, but all I could think about were the candles that were already lit. Who had come here before me and what did they want? Did girls still want to be married and loved? Did they want to never be alone? Or had the priest lit these himself, a primer to bring the faithful from the street like moths? I could have prayed, Dear God, please keep me from Carmel, where every day my car was headed. It was a full day’s drive. I would have to sleep over and come home the next morning, and how would I explain that? And what if I went and Thomas never asked me where I’d been for fear I might go away again and come back in two days or three or not at all? Would I head on to Oregon, or south through Mexico? I had the maps. But I could not pray for what I didn’t want. I was careful with my prayers, now that they had been answered.

This is how the days passed, weeks and months. Places I could get to in time to come home. I worked as a temporary secretary and would call in to the placement office when the money I had didn’t seem like enough. I would stay in a job for two days, a week, typing or filing, answering the phones, until whoever was missing came back and I had time to drive again. I didn’t always stay on the freeways. Some things can be seen only by going off onto the secondary roads: the migrant workers moving through the strawberry fields, the palm trees. I liked to go down side streets, looking at the houses and the bicycles in the yard. Sometimes I would drive all the way to San Diego just going through neighborhoods. When I got into town I took my mother out to lunch.

“Why aren’t you home?” she said. “Doesn’t Thomas worry about you? My God, I hate to think of you just driving around out there.”

“I only drive to see you,” I said.

“I’d feel better to think of you home,” she said. Even though I knew which home she meant, I liked to think it was with her.

My mother had married Joe the spring after I left, and it made me sad in a way, not her marriage, but the fact that she felt she had to wait for me to go. “Who’d have thought we’d be a couple of old married women having lunch?” she liked to say to me. My mother was happy being married. It was a gift she had given herself, the permission finally to live again the way she thought was natural. Her life was good. She was doing well at work. She had regular customers who refused to talk to anyone but her. I tried to talk to her, to tell her about the pain in my chest that could be eased only by a drive, to tell her that May reminded me so much of October and this year of last year, but I couldn’t say things I didn’t have words for yet. All I was sure of was that I loved her, her red lipstick, her delicate hands. Sometimes I drove all the way to San Diego but would only stand in the accessories department, watching her over a counter of scarves while she told another woman how to be beautiful.

After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the traffic whipping past me. I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do. Not Thomas, not anyone I know. Someone is just going to get in the car beside me and say, Martha Rose, this is what we’re going to do here. And I’d have done it, I swear to God, but no one came. Not even a cop to see if I was okay. For three years I hadn’t been able to say what was wrong with my life, but at that moment it all became very clear. I had married a man I did not love. I was mistaken in my sign. I would have to have something else because this could not possibly be my life.

In a way I thought it would get easier from then on, because knowing is easier. But how I would have rather known three months before, when I could have left with nothing inside me but guilt and sorrow. I kneaded my flat stomach with my hand. I dug the heel of my hand into the skin until I could feel a small pain, and then I pressed harder.

I slept at home that night and never said a word. In the morning Thomas sat at the breakfast table, grading a stack of papers. He was teaching summer school. “Show your work,” he wrote on the top of a paper, and then worked the problem at the bottom the way it should be done, line after line of numbers and letters I couldn’t understand. I had never done well in geometry.

“She got the answer right,” he said. “See that.”

I looked at the paper. The girl had nice handwriting. I wondered if she was in love with him.

“Are you going to work today?” he asked.

“At a lawyer’s office,” I said. “It should last all week.”

“Rose, Rose,” he said and leaned over the table, over the cereal bowls and cups of coffee, and kissed my cheek, my mouth.

A lump came up in my throat. He was never a bad man. No one will ever say that Thomas Clinton was a bad man. “Come on,” I said. “We need to get going.”

When we got to school he told me not to worry about picking him up. “It’s a nice day,” he said. But in Marina del Rey they were all nice days.

“Make them all smarter,” I said, because it’s what I said every morning when he left.

“I’ll do my best.”

And then he was gone, mingling in with a sea of children. He was twenty-six years old.

When I went to Father O’Donnell, it was not to confess but to make him my accomplice. I needed the name of a place to go, someplace far away, where women had babies and left them behind, like pieces of furniture too heavy to move. A place that gave the babies to remarkable people, so fit to be parents that their sterility was unconscionable. I also wanted him to tell Thomas, when he came looking for me, that my desire to leave was sincere and he should let me go without ever telling him where I had gone. I’m making this sound very easy, when in fact it was not. It was sad enough to change my life for good, to make the blood reverse the course of its flow in my veins.

I was going to Saint Elizabeth’s. Father O’Donnell had a file, which he brought out with great difficulty. It contained fliers, nearly advertisements, that addressed the problems of unfortunate Catholic girls. Words like comfort and prayer were scattered through the texts, along with moral guidance. But I was interested in the location more than the description. Saint Elizabeth’s was in Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me.

“Tell me you’ll wait until tomorrow,” Father O’Donnell said. “Go home to Thomas, just for tonight, or go to your mother’s. This isn’t a decision to be made quickly.”

Father O’Donnell had baptized me and given me my first communion. He had buried my father and married me. I had been in love with him when I was a girl. I had wished he was my father. Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear. His face was flushed and damp, and there was a trembling around his mouth not unlike my own. I may have made a mistake in going to him, though it seemed right at the time. California was full of priests who would try to dissuade me but not feel disappointed in me. It was his house, not God’s, that I had come to in my moment of confusion. His windows full of saints, his pews, his rack of candles. Whenever I kissed a boy in school, cut a day of classes, argued with my mother, over what I can’t remember, it was not God’s forgiveness I sought, but his. He was the one I told. We sat in a small room behind the altar which he used to dress in before mass. His vestments hung on wire coat hangers from the doorjamb, great satin robes that looked ridiculously beautiful with no one in them. The window in that room had plain glass in it, meant for looking out over the parking lot and not for inspiration. There was a crucifix over the washbasin where anyplace else there would have been a mirror.

“I have to go today,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake and if I don’t leave now I might not be able to straighten things out.”

“Divorce is a sin, Rose, I can’t tell you otherwise. People today think that whatever they want, right at that moment, will be fine. But there are larger things to consider. Can you not see that?”

It was a strange thing, but I never even considered divorcing Thomas. I was only leaving him. For some reason that seemed different, even if I couldn’t say what the difference was exactly. “I’m doing the only thing I can do,” I said.

When I wrote down the address of Saint Elizabeth’s, my hand was shaking. I asked if he would write a letter, telling them I was coming. “Don’t tell them about Thomas,” I said. I thought the fact that I was married might disqualify me from a home for unwed mothers.

I stood for a long time at the door, looking around the altar to the church where I had spent so much of my life. Mrs. Marnez was there lighting candles, as I had done year after year, asking God to show her His will. Old Henry at the front railing on his knees. A few people I didn’t know.

“What about your mother?” he said.

“Don’t tell her either.”

“Are you going to let her think you’re dead?” he said. His voice was a whisper but it carried, as the voice of a good priest carries.

“Don’t ask me this.”

“You’ve asked enough of me today, now I’m asking you, Rose. What will you do about your mother?”

I turned around to face him, but I shouldn’t have. I understood then why confessionals were dark places where you told your secrets through screens. “I’ll give her up,” I said, and went out to the car. The second I said it I knew that would be my penance, the worst thing I could bear. I was doing a terrible thing, but I would pay the price. If I gave up the thing I loved most in the world, then maybe God would respect my desperation.

Elizabeth was not the saint I would have chosen to name a home for unwed mothers after. She had wanted a child, prayed for one for so many years, and when John came to her late in life she was filled with joy. But then again she was a woman who found herself pregnant when she did not think that such a thing was possible. Maybe that was the part they wanted us to remember. I have always taken names very seriously, people or places. It’s because my mother took them seriously. It was my father who wanted to name me Rose. My mother told a story of being pregnant with me. “Big as a ship,” she liked to say. She would lie on a chaise longue in the little garden outside their apartment, her swollen feet sunk into a sea of pillows, and argue with my father over names. “He was sure I was giving birth to a flower,” she would say. “Lily, Iris, Daisy, those were the kinds of names he was interested in.” My mother believed that a name should come from the Bible or at least a saint. She settled on Martha, despite what Jesus had said. She understood how Martha felt, wishing her sister would give her a little help in the kitchen. Anyone would rather sit and listen, but there are some things, like dinner, that needed to be attended to. So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that. My mother had a sudden change of heart then. She saw my father’s need for a name that bore no more significance than the bush that grew alongside the house. A name that was as important as beauty itself. Elizabeth lost her child, too, in the end. That was another thing.

But I didn’t think about any of this for a long time, until I was nearly across the California state line. Until then I was crying for my own mother with such a fierceness that I twice had to pull the car over to the side of the road because I couldn’t see.

August was a lethal time to attempt such a drive, but there was no waiting. A seasoned liar, like the one I became, is in no hurry. But the one I started out as that day in the doctor’s office, my knees pressed together tighdy, had hands that shook. I looked over my shoulder, cried easily. All of that is gone now.

The backseat was lined with water bottles and they made a gentle sloshing sound that was almost like an ocean. It was all I could think of to bring. My life, the car’s life, were completely intertwined, and water, I thought, would save us both. The sun made waving lines of heat across the black highway. The land was so desolate, so untraveled, that I couldn’t imagine why they had built a highway there at all. It was not so much a place as much as a place to get through, a stretch you had to cross if you were ever going to get to where you were going.

It turned out I had a little money saved. I had started putting some aside when I was taking so many trips. I thought, what if something ever happened when I was on the road, something could break down. I kept a bank envelope under the tarp that covered the spare tire and whenever I had a job I’d put in ten or twenty. I didn’t take a dime from Thomas when I left, but I took his car. That car had become my best friend. I could leave my husband but not his car. By the time I pulled into a gas station in Barstow I had spent the little bit I had in my purse, and so I took out the envelope. There was more than six hundred dollars in there, and I kept thinking, I must have known, all the time I was slipping in money, never looking to see how much I had, part of me was planning to leave.

But worrying about the car made me careful, and most nights I just pulled over to a rest stop and put the water bottles on the floor and slept in the backseat. If something happened to the car I’d be wiped out, stuck in some desert town with no way to go on. In Barstow I asked a station attendant with the name Dwight stitched on his shirt in red cursive letters to look under the hood for me.

“I’m going a long way by myself,” I told him. I leaned under with him, trying to get a little of the shade. It was sickeningly hot, 105, maybe more. “I just wish you’d check to see if everything’s all right. I don’t want to get out in the middle of nowhere by myself and have something happen,” I said.

Dwight slipped his finger down into one of the belts, gave it a little tug. “Woman shouldn’t be traveling alone,” he said.

I knew it could go either way. He could help me out or drop an aspirin into the battery which would send me limping back to him as soon as I was five miles out of town. “I could use your help,” I said. “I’m going to have a baby.” It was the first time I’d just said it out like that. It was the first time it occurred to me that it could be something to use. “I’m headed just past Las Cruces. My husband, he’s stationed out at Fort Bliss. He didn’t want me to come alone, but he couldn’t get leave to get me.”

He looked at me under the hood. My dress was loose and blew around, there would be no telling for sure. “You’re in good shape,” he said, touching the spark plugs. “I’ll fill up the radiator, but you keep an eye on that. Pull over every hundred miles or so and check it. The water, it’s got to be up to here. But don’t touch anything. If it overheats, you just stand back and wait.” I thanked him. I meant it. When I got back into the car he came back and leaned in my window. “People will tell you your transmission’s going to go. But don’t listen to them. Your transmission is good.”

There were so many things I needed to know, how to fix a car, how to lic. My mother taught me how to put on eyeliner without smudging it, but life was going to take more than that.

This driving was not a game. My back ached down into my hips and I tried moving to one side and then another. Only the week before I had thought I wanted nothing more in the world than to drive in one endless direction. Highway 40 was exactly that. East was an endless direction. The radio came in and out in waves. I ran out of songs I knew the words to and then sang them all over again. I played games with myself. At the next town I’ll stop. I’ll take off a whole day, get a motel room, sleep. But the next town would come and I’d say, You’ve made it this far, you might as well keep going, one more hour won’t make a difference and that will be an hour you won’t have to drive tomorrow. When I did stop, it was to get gas, check the oil, fill the radiator. I would walk around the car a couple of times, lift my hands up over my head, stare at the landscape that looked the way it had on the stop before and the stop before that. I did not know how to keep going and I did not know how to stop, so I kept going.

I had started to doubt my body. When I got so tired that the cars in front of me began to sway on the road, I remembered my mother saying how tired she had been when she was pregnant, and I would think, so you’re not really tired. When I felt sick at my stomach, I wondered if I was actually sick, or if that was just part of it, too. Anything I could attribute to this baby I could dismiss, because I’d decided somewhere along the road that I was going to have nothing to do with it. I was following through on my part of it. I would see this pregnancy out, but that was it, no sickness, no side effects. It was enough that I was going so far to have it, and that I would see it delivered into the hands of those decent parents whose complete and wholesome lives I liked to contemplate. There was a difference, I knew, between being pregnant and being a mother. I was pregnant.

The steering wheel was so hot I couldn’t move my hands around. That was one of the worst parts about stopping, making a cool place for your hands again. I tried writing letters to my mother in my head, but they weren’t any better than the note I’d left for Thomas. I wanted to do better for her. I knew she’d been a good wife to my father, that she was a good wife to Joe, even if she could never love him in the same way. She took marriage seriously, as she had taken motherhood seriously. She would find a way to love me even if I told her the truth, but I could feel her disappointment like a hot wind on my neck. The truth was something that would have to be mine alone. It was something that receded as I drove east.

There was a time in my life when I’d wanted to know everything. I wanted to read the brutal details of every local murder. I wanted to know exactly how my father had died, the extent of damage to the car, the very place it happened. Facts had a certain irresistible quality. No matter how deeply they disturbed me, I thought I was better off knowing. But learning is easier than forgetting. The fact that my mother, that Thomas, didn’t know where I had gone or the reason, made my life easier, but I liked to think it made things easier for them as well. The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t lie to her. Late one night, after eating eggs and toast in a truck stop in New Mexico, I got all the quarters the cashier would give me and called her up. The phone was in the parking lot, and when I shut the door to the booth it gave off a blue fluorescent light. I put the change in a napkin and fed it steadily into the phone. When Joe answered I was so surprised that for a minute I couldn’t think of what to say.

“It’s Rose,” I told him.

“Rose? Rose?” He didn’t speak to me but dropped the phone on the bed and called out for my mother. Both of us were crying when she picked up, and it made it harder to understand what was being said.

“Come home,” my mother said.

I can’t.

“You will,” she said. “I love you. I’m not going to have you lost out in the world. You’re my daughter.”

I put a hand over my other ear, trying to block out the sounds of the traffic. “Things just weren’t right,” I said. “My life, it wasn’t right. I can’t tell you about it now, you’re just going to have to trust me. I’m doing what’s best.” It was almost exactly what I had written on the postcards I hadn’t mailed. It sounded every bit as wrong when I said it.

“Whatever this is, we’ll fix it. Thomas is going crazy. He’s terrible, Rose. You can leave if you have to but not like this.”

I looked out at the traffic going along the highway. “I’m already gone,” I said.

I stayed in the booth for a while after I hung up. Then I opened the door, which automatically snapped off the light. I had promised myself I would stay in that town for the night. But I didn’t.

There was nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me. The world consisted of as much road as I could see in either direction. I found myself looking forward to towns, counting down the miles to Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Amarillo. When I got close to a city I felt almost euphoric, as if I had finally arrived, but five minutes later I would be on the other side, looking at the mileage for whatever was ahead. I was disappointed in myself because it used to be I’d never care at all. But now I was tired in my bones. It was important for me to have something to concentrate on, because when my mind wandered it went to my mother, or worse yet, Thomas. I would picture him sitting in our house, the lights off, trying to watch television. I could see him going through my dresses in the closet, running his hands along the sleeves. The worst was to think of him eating. The thought of him at the table alone, trying to finish dinner, was nearly enough to make me turn the car around. Once I did, just before Oklahoma. I drove back twenty-five miles, and then turned around again just as quickly, because nothing looked any different. To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.

Just over the Oklahoma border, thirty-five miles outside Elk City, I picked up a hitchhiker. I told myself I wouldn’t do it. It went against everything I believed about driving as something best done alone. But the sight of Oklahoma scared me to death. I pulled into a rest stop to refill my water bottles from a public spigot and spread the map across the hood. Arkansas was as far away as China.