Aftertime

29

IN THE MORNING SHE WAS ALONE IN THE TENT and she thought: Smoke is a man who comes and goes quietly.

And then she thought-Ruthie. Today was the day she would find out how to get inside the Convent, and she would search for her Ruthie.

Do the next right thing, Pat’s voice-Hello, my name is Pat and I’m an alcoholic-said in her head, all reasonable insistence, the voice of a hundred meetings in the church basement. Pat listened; Pat never judged. Pat was bald except for a silver fringe on the back of his head and looked like he ought to be a grandfather, and Pat just kept listening. What if I don’t know the next right thing, Cass had demanded-had whined really, if she were to be honest-and Pat had said, It’s only one little next right thing, Cass, don’t think so hard, and the guy with the red hair-she couldn’t remember his name now because he didn’t last more than a few months-had muttered, Man plans and God laughs, which had struck Cass as funny and kind of clever, in context, a lot more clever than any of the stupid A.A. phrases…but by summer that guy was gone and Cass was still there so who was right, in the end?

So she would do the next right thing, and that thing was: Find Gloria.

She took the little bucket of personal supplies to the bathroom and was relieved to find that there was no further charge to use it, because Smoke had done all their trading and she didn’t know how it was done and she didn’t feel like letting her ignorance show. There was no sign of Smoke and Cass only saw a few other people trudging between the tents, shivering in hoodies and flannel shirts, and she realized that it was earlier than she’d first thought, maybe six or six-thirty on a late-summer morning.

When she returned to their tent she saw that Faye was standing in front of it, holding a steaming mug.

“There you are,” she said with a sly smile.

“Sorry, I was just at the, uh, ladies’ room.”

“Word is you two put on a bit of a show last night,” Faye said conversationally, and Cass felt her face redden. “Hey, you provided everyone some entertainment around here. And you got something that did you good. So chill. You ready to go meet Gloria?”

“Yeah, just let me get-something,” she said, and poked her head into the tent. Really, she only wanted to see if Smoke had returned, but nothing looked disturbed. The covers were still tangled. Her pack was where she left it.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

Faye led her through the camp. They passed the merchant stands, where people were stacking and arranging their wares-their toothbrushes and playing cards and packets of aspirin and Theraflu, their paper plates and toilet paper and candles and cans of beans and condensed milk and Chef Boyardee-and righting overturned camp chairs and cleaning up litter from the night before. A fire burned in a grate near where the remains of the bonfire smoldered, and coffee boiled in a pot on top, and Cass felt her stomach growl. Well, maybe later she could ask Smoke to buy her a meal. And coffee-a cup of hot, thick coffee. But for now she would concentrate on Gloria.

“Here,” Faye said abruptly, veering off to the left, past the fenced-off area where the bike Smoke had traded was parked next to other motorcycles and a few bicycles and skateboards. “The cheap seats.”

Cass hadn’t noticed them the night before-a row of canvas cots lined up next to the fence. In nearly all of them, motionless forms slept under drab, rough blankets, a few possessions piled under the ends of the beds.

Cass followed Faye to the end of the row, trying not to stare. At the very end a woman with long gray hair escaping its braid sat with her back to them at the edge of her cot, bent over her knees; too late Cass realized she was throwing up.

“Aw, shit, Gloria,” Faye exclaimed. “Here?”

“I’ll clean it up, I’ll clean it up,” the woman said hastily, her voice reedy and frail, a girl’s voice in a middle-aged woman’s body. “I’m sorry, I think I must have eaten something-”

“You mean, like a fifth of cheap gin,” Faye growled. “I’ll send someone. You didn’t get it on the bed, did you?”

“No, no, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Okay, well, I brought you someone who wants to talk to you. Take a walk with her. We’ll have this taken care of when you get back.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you,” Gloria said. She stood and started to walk down the path along the fence, not even looking at Cass, who hurried to catch up.

“You’re the girl wants to get in the Convent,” she said when Cass fell into step with her, stealing a sideways glance as though she was afraid of being found out. “They told me you’d come.”

Cass saw pale green eyes in a weathered face, lashes bleached by the sun, cheekbones that were still regal. Gloria had once been a beauty, but Cass saw something else, something that was as familiar to her as the chipped, heavy mugs at the meetings: more regrets than a human being could keep hidden, so that they found their way to the surface, traced in the faint lines and creases of her skin.

“I do want to get in,” she said carefully. “I need your help.”

The corner of Gloria’s mouth twitched, a tic that only underscored her anxiety, and darted a glance at Cass. “How do I know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re who you say you are. That you’re not one of theirs.”

“One of…whose?”

Gloria’s tic intensified and she pressed a fist against her mouth, pushing hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “They could have sent you. Mother Cora and the rest. To spy on me.”

“Gloria…I don’t know who that is,” Cass said, trying to contain her impatience. “I just got here. I’ve never been in there. I need your help…please.”

“They’re not supposed to come in here,” Gloria whispered, walking with her shoulders hunched. “It’s Dor’s rule. It’s his rule.”

“The people…from the Convent, they aren’t allowed in here? In the Box?”

“They can’t come in here.”

“But I’m here. They let me in here. So, I can’t be from there, right?”

Cass felt a little silly trying to reason with Gloria, but she could tell that the woman’s fear was real. Very gently, Cass touched her thin shoulder. Gloria startled at the touch, but after a moment she sighed and gave Cass another sidelong glance, pushing at the long gray hair that had come loose and tumbled around her shoulders.

“I wish I had an elastic,” she said. “For my hair. Do you have an elastic?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Cass said.

“Okay. That’s how it is-anytime you think of something that would actually be useful, you can never find it.”

“You mean…”

“In my house, I lived on the first floor of a nice old house. You should have seen it…I had a collection of tea tins. The ones with the pretty designs on them. Some of them were my mother’s. Oh, some of them were very old. And I don’t know, they may have been valuable, to someone, but I didn’t even care about them. They were just… always there, you know?”

She sketched a shelf in the air with her fingers, and Cass knew she was seeing the tins in her mind, the way they looked in her kitchen. Cass had done the same thing a thousand times; nearly everyone had-remembering the things that were lost.

But then Gloria chopped the air with the hand that had been tracing a memory, a harsh gesture followed by a sharper exhalation. “I never used them. They were empty, all of them, and they sat there and I looked at them all the time and I never took them off the shelf and put anything in them. And then-one day, in the Convent, I was on washing. Me and a woman named…something. Maybe it was Alice. We were pinning the clothes on the line. We had the cheap clothespins, a pack of a thousand someone got from the Wal-Mart, but, you know, Before. And they were in this plastic bag and they kept spilling out and we tried to twist the top closed but it just kept opening, all those clothespins lying on the ground, and I thought, my tins-it would have been perfect. The clothespins in the tins, and I wished right then that I had one of them, even one, just one. I would put the clothespins in the tin and